How an Edmonton AI company alerts NATO, U.S. government to chaos hotspots
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An Edmonton company has used AI to do just that — and NATO, the U.K. Ministry of Defence and the U.S. government (and another 100 or so organizations) — are listening, says samdesk CEO and founder James Neufeld.
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'One of the challenges that we saw universally across the private and public sector is they always felt they were one step behind. They found out maybe hours or days later,' Neufeld said at media conference last month with emergency management and community resilience minister Eleanor Olszewski.
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'And from an emergency management standpoint, every second or every minute that goes by, it really erodes your ability to effectively respond. The wildfire grows, the crisis grows.'
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Billions of daily social media posts document real-time experiences. That wealth of intelligence can be powerful for emergency response — eyes and ears on the ground to know where to deploy resources.
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Natural disaster? Vandalism? Wildfire? Volatile unrest in the streets?
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Tipping in satellite imagery and other data sources from government, AI pattern-recognition technology correlates it all, spotting the chaos nuclei. Earlier signal, earlier mitigation.
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Pointing to a large screen dashboard in action, Neufeld fascinated onlookers with a global view, quickly zooming in on northern Alberta.
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Samdesk's mission is to warn clients: 'Hey, you have a piece of infrastructure that might be under this emergency,' or 'Power outage in Saskatchewan,' or 'Firm up your supply chains,' or even 'Evacuate!'
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Origins in news
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The development of the company was newsroom-inspired, from a decade of journalists watching social media for eyewitness information outside of government sources, Neufeld said.
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'It wasn't a single source anymore. It was becoming democratized,' he said, citing the coverage of the 2011 Arab Spring revolt and regional wildfires, where people on the ground documented the latest developments.
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'What we learned really was, while a lot of newsrooms called it breaking news, the rest of us probably called it something else. It was a crisis. It wasn't a story. It was a real, live situation. It was something that needed to be responded to, something that needed being managed,' he said.
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