Google improves, expands its AI-enabled flood alerts for Bangladesh, India   

Google has improved and expanded a programme that uses artificial intelligence to forecast floods in South Asia in partnership with Bangladesh and India.

News Deskbdnews24.com
Published : 1 Sept 2020, 06:38 PM
Updated : 1 Sept 2020, 06:38 PM

The tech titan provided an update on how it has been expanding and improving these efforts, as well as a new partnership it has formed with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in a blog post on Tuesday.

In recent months, Google has been expanding its forecasting models and services in partnership with the Indian Central Water Commission.

In June, just in time for the monsoon season, Google reached an important milestone: its systems now extend to the whole of India, with Google technology being used to improve the targeting of every alert the government sends.

This means it can help better protect more than 200 million people across more than 250,000 square kilometres, or more than 20 times its coverage last year.

Google said it has sent out around 30 million notifications to people in flood-affected areas until now.

In addition to expanding in India, Google has partnered with the Bangladesh Water Development Board to bring its warnings and services to Bangladesh, “which experiences more flooding than any other country in the world”, according to the blog post.

It said Google currently covers more than 40 million people in Bangladesh, and it is working to extend this to the whole country.

Google.org has also started a collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies with an aim to build local networks that can get disaster alert information to people who wouldn’t otherwise receive smartphone alerts directly.

In collaboration with Yale University, Google has been visiting flood-affected areas and doing research to better understand what information people need, how they use it to protect themselves, and what we can do to make that information more accessible.

One survey it conducted found that 65 percent of people who receive flood warnings before the flooding begins take action to protect themselves or their assets, such as evacuating or moving their belongings.

Photo courtesy of Google's official blog The Keyword

But it has also found there is “a lot more” it could be doing to help — including getting alerts to people faster, and providing additional information about the severity of floods.

“Of course, for all the progress we’ve made with alert technology, there are still a lot of challenges to overcome. With the flood season still in full swing in India and Bangladesh, COVID-19 has delayed critical infrastructure work, added to the immense pressure on first responders and medical authorities, and disrupted the in-person networks that many people still rely on for advance notice when a flood is on the way,” Google said.

“There’s much more work ahead to strengthen the systems that so many vulnerable people rely on—and expand them to reach more people in flood-affected areas. Along with our partners around the world, we will continue developing, maintaining and improving technologies and digital tools to help protect communities and save lives,” it added.

Fortune magazine in an article said changes in the technology underpinning the system have allowed Google to double the warning time it is now providing, giving people detailed alerts up to 48 hours before flooding occurs.

Google began its Flood Forecast Initiative in 2017, covering the area around Patna, the capital of the Indian state of Bihar, historically the country's most flood-prone region. In 2019, Bihar experienced some of the worst floods in a quarter-century, which killed more than 130 people.

Sella Nevo, a senior software engineer at Google who leads the flood forecasting project, said part of its improvement in forecasting in India has involved working with the Indian government to improve how it collects data on water levels—including the installation of new, electronic sensors that automatically transmit data back to water authorities.

“While some of these problems are specific to flood monitoring in India and other developing nations, some of the techniques Google has pioneered in India could change flood forecasting worldwide,” Fortune wrote.

Quoting Nevo, the magazine said even state-of-the-art flood forecasting had previously relied on hydrologic models that were based largely on maps of local topography and conceptual principles derived from physics.

Each watershed was thought to be unique—leaving little ability to create a model that would work equally well across different river basins, Nevo explained.

Google, instead, took an approach largely based on AI, in which software analyses historical flood data taken from several different river basins in different parts of the world and trains itself to make accurate predictions for almost any river basin, he added.