“We started conversations with Microsoft to see if we could use AI to identify these houses so we could spend more time on the ground helping people.”
Manually collecting information about houses that’d be vulnerable is a very time-intensive task and we can, at best, evaluate 100 houses in a day,” says Raghav Ranganathan, technical director, SEEDS. “We usually come to know a cyclone’s predicted path 48 hours or so before it makes landfall. She even managed to move the contents of her food stall to a neighbor’s concrete house that could withstand the high-velocity winds. The advisory, which she and nearly a thousand other families received, was the result of an artificial intelligence (AI) model by SEEDS, a non-profit that had recently received a Microsoft AI for Humanitarian Action grant.įollowing the instructions on the sheet of paper, her family packed their belongings and left for a nearby cyclone shelter, one of the hundreds created after the 1999 super-cyclone. Satyavati received a personalized advisory printed in her language a day before the cyclone made landfall. Cyclones–known elsewhere as hurricanes and typhoons–are intense tropical storms that originate in the Indian Ocean.īut in May this year, when Cyclone Yaas was about to make landfall, things were a little different. Winds of up to 160 miles an hour (257 kilometers an hour) killed thousands and left behind a trail of destruction. She was among the lucky ones who survived a “super cyclone” that tore through the state of Odisha on India’s east coast in 1999. We prayed for the storm to pass, but we lost everything we had,” says Kalpreddy Satyavati, who runs a tiny food stall catering to the local fishing community in the coastal town of Puri.
“We fled to the nearby forest and clung on to swaying trees for our lives.
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