AI4SG collaboration between UMass and the Red Cross matures

  • In March 2022, Subhransu Maji, co-director of the Computer Vision Lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, attends the AI4SG Dagstuhl seminar. Subhransu: “At the seminar, I started collaborating with folks from the Red Cross on an ML tool to assess damage of buildings and infrastructure in the wake of natural disasters.”
  • Fast-forward to Summer 2022: Yunfei Luo, Siddhi Brahmbhatt and Shruti Chanumolu, UMass students in the Data Science for Common Good program that’s led by Thomas Bernardin, continue the work on the Red Cross project (with help from Dagstuhl attendee Sara Beery (Caltech)).
  • November 2022: the UMass Center for Data Science announces that data scientist Virginia Partridge and MS student Tanmay Agrawal will dedicate time to this project. Jacopo Margutti from the Red Cross is excited: “Having such a serious, longer-term commitment from an academic partner is an enormous boost for our work in the AI/ML space. We’ve already started using the damage assessment tool in real life, but it can certainly benefit from further expansion and refinement.”
Written on December 2, 2022