New AI Can Detect Earthquakes With Up To 70% Accuracy
Once it has been shown that AI is not a threat to humanity, we can now focus on the practical aspects of the technology that continue to evolve week by week. One of them is that AI could help us predict natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes.
Thus, after a group of Norwegian scientists and geologists were able at the beginning of the year to develop an artificial intelligence that can predict floods, we have just learned that several American researchers have created an artificial intelligence capable of detecting earthquakes with 70% accuracy.
A recent report from SciTech Daily revealed that a group of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin were able to create an AI algorithm that correctly predicted 70% of the earthquakes that occurred in China over a 7-month period one week in advance.
Specifically, the results of these tests produced weekly forecasts in which the AI was able to successfully predict 14 earthquakes with a margin of error of about 200 miles regarding where they were expected to occur, and all of the detected seismic movements were of a magnitude very similar to those predicted by the algorithm.
Likewise, during the tests conducted, this revolutionary AI detected only one earthquake and reported 8 false warnings.
The test comes as part of an international competition held in the Asian country, in which the artificial intelligence created by researchers at the University of Texas won first place, beating 600 other algorithms. In addition, the tests conducted using this artificial intelligence were supervised by the office’s seismologist and the main developer of the artificial intelligence, Yangkang Chen, and its results were published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
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Sergey Fomel, a professor at the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology and a member of the AI research team, said the following about the algorithm they created and its near future:
“Earthquake prediction is improving, although we are still far from being able to predict any part of the world, but what we have achieved tells us that what we thought was an impossible problem can in principle be solved.”