Two new AI-powered fire cameras added above Malibu Play

Two new Alert California fire cameras have been installed in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. These are in addition to the two that were installed on the KBUU tower more than a year ago at Rancho del Cielo.

The scientist who designed the cameras is now relaying to the public why he did this.

Dr. Neil Driscoll is a research scientist at the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Fires are not exactly oceanography, but fires touched Dr. Driscoll.

In 2003, his neighborhood in suburban San Diego got caught in a sudden brush fire, the Witch Fire. People were killed in that one.

"These fires just devastate people, devastate communities. If we can prevent this anxiety and this fear and deep-rooted just concern from people that have gone through this, that's a success."

In the 2003 fire just north of San Diego, Driscoll had to get his kids and his wife out of the neighborhood quickly. He says that affected him profoundly.

"It impacted a lot of people. It was the largest fire at the time in California.

"It skirted up my neighborhood. There was like 23, 24 people lost their lives. We didn't know where to go. So you called 911 and said, 'I can't see.' The whole sky was orange."

Dr. Driscoll is a scientist at UC San Diego, and he has access to remote-control camera equipment and infrared equipment that can spot fires automatically.

Thus, Alert California was born. The key part, he says, is the artificial intelligence that keeps an eye on thousands of cameras around the state simultaneously.

"The AI says, 'look at these cameras. Something has changed since I've rotated or I've taken the 60-degree image.'

"So the AI is just saying, 'go look at the change. Tell me if it's a fire, or it's the marine layer, it's fog, it's a dust devil.'

"So all of a sudden we have a change detector that allows watch-stander fatigue to be removed. It reduces the noise."

Alert California is a demonstration project partly funded by Microsoft, and they clearly have an ulterior motive for telling Driscoll's story. But it's an important story: artificial intelligence is here, and it's being used to keep our neighborhood safer.