In 2022 there will be twice as many sensors dedicated to the collection of information and will increase the use of artificial intelligence data for the benefit of the environment, told Efe the director of artificial intelligence system Watson IBM Latin America, Martha Gonzalez.
"The only thing left for the use of artificial intelligence on the environment is to grow," said the expert in an interview, who explained that it has many uses for water supply, food production or intelligent buildings.
Artificial intelligence understands and analyzes unstructured data that is captured by sensors, something that in the environment serves to improve the efficiency of decision making, replacing human indecision with machine accuracy.
Currently, IBM has "collected a large amount of data from around the world" such as "changes in winds, changes in radiation, among many others that today can be translated and used in impact issues".
One of the applications is the prediction of forest fires through the use of different technological programs "such as placing sensors in forest trees," he said.
"We also rely on the history of climate behavior in each region and detect the heat zones in case they are changing," said this specialist with 20 years of experience in business process transformation enabled through innovation technologies such as artificial intelligence.
This exhaustive monitoring of forest cover makes it possible to give simple and decisive recommendations at the same time. For example, by pointing out to the authorities which corners of your country are the driest and should be irrigated.
Away from the forests, artificial intelligence is being applied to cities, specifically to intelligent buildings.
These, knowing variables such as energy consumption, geographic location, climate, traffic hours and surrounding events, can help reduce the energy used by the building and, therefore, its environmental impact.
Agriculture can also benefit from the weather data and the data captured by the sensors placed on the tractors, the farmer has a wide range of advice in their decision making.
This type of intelligence "can give me advice on what type of crop to grow based on the weather forecast, and also see if there are pests and how they interact," said the graduate in information technology from the Universidad Iberoamericana.
In this way, the greater the knowledge of the pest, the less risk there is of crop failure and the better solutions can be taken to eradicate it.
At the food level, greater control of the production chain helps to ensure that there is no food waste.
Regarding water, Gonzalez said that for some time now, predictive algorithms have been used to detect leaks and better distribute the water supply.
"We are perfectly capable of identifying the flow, what is the volume of water passing through, etcetera," he said, adding that, to know in the future which regions will have water and which will not, they rely on heat measurements and historical weather patterns.
Knowing how the rain has behaved, according to the specialist, allows governments to better decide when to carry out awareness campaigns to save water.
To conclude, he called to understand artificial intelligence "not as a fad, but as something that has come to stay and improve people's lives".
Every day, this technology makes its way expanding its spectrum to more applications, also in the environmental field. This is in spite of the difficulty that its implementation by governments sometimes entails, either due to lack of resources or organizational failures.
Source: Montevideo Portal with information from EFE
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