Rescue Reimagined: How AI and AR could transform search missions

Time is the most critical moment for search and rescue. Every second really can matter between life and death for someone. And so if it's AI and technology, a possible solution to help a rescuer find someone a little bit faster, that could potentially mean saving their life. We are looking to see how AI can assist sense-making and decision-making for these critical types of operations today we were recording points of view from several actors that would be running a search and rescue scenario what the participants will find later on is that an individual was driving a vehicle and went over a bridge and went into the river after we collect all these points of view videos we're going to run them through a number of different ai algorithms for object detection, scene classification for the environment and for what's going on and once we have all these videos then we're going to review them with other search and rescue professionals, law enforcement from various police departments and individuals that have a military background. The teams that had the AI technique that provided computer vision based object detection, those teams were more effective at progressing through the scenario and ultimately finding the missing person. The project was a collaboration between the Department of Biological Systems Engineering and Computer Science. The Department of Computer Science brings in the expertise relevant to AI, to technology and augmented reality and so on. And with the biological systems engineering, we have the water systems knowledge and understanding and research. We bring those two together and allow for search and rescue teams to be able to identify objects in surface water, in bodies of water like lakes and rivers and so on. It's innovative thinkers like Matt and his support team and the benefits that his advisors give him to kind of dig into these questions to see how we can actually utilize technology to assist us. There are situations where the person is still alive and those are the situations where I hope that maybe AI technologies, maybe ones that I've made in research, can really assist people.