"AI May Come to the Rescue of Future Firefighters"

In firefighting, the worst flames are the ones you don’t see coming.  It is very difficult to notice signs of impending flashover, a deadly fire phenomenon wherein nearly all combustible items in a room ignite suddenly.  Flashover is one of the leading causes of firefighter deaths, but new research suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) could provide first responders with a much-needed heads-up.   Security researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and other institutions have developed a Flashover Prediction Neural Network (FlashNet) model to forecast the lethal events precious seconds before they erupt.  The researchers noted that FlashNet boasted an accuracy of up to 92.1% across more than a dozen common residential floorplans in the U.S. and came out on top when going head-to-head with other AI-based flashover predicting programs.  To anticipate flashovers, existing research tools either rely on constant streams of temperature data from burning buildings or use machine learning to fill in the missing data in the likely event that heat detectors succumb to high temperatures.  The researchers stated that until now, most machine learning-based prediction tools had been trained to operate in a single, familiar environment.  In reality, firefighters are not afforded such luxury.  The researchers at NIST noted that the previous model only had to consider four or five rooms in one layout, but when the layout switches and you have 13 or 14 rooms, it can be a nightmare for the model.  The researchers stated that for real-world application, they believe the key is to move to a generalized model that works for many different buildings.  To cope with the variability of real fires, the researchers beefed up their approach with graph neural networks (GNN), a machine learning algorithm good at making judgments based on graphs of nodes and lines, representing different data points and their relationships with one another.

NIST reports: "AI May Come to the Rescue of Future Firefighters"