Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, & Cybersecurity
Current Co-Chairs: Yoon Ko (National Research Council Canada) & David Icove (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Digitalization and artificial intelligence play an increasing role in our societies, not only in business environments but also in people’s personal lives (e.g., through AI implementation on their cell phones). With this increased role come new opportunities to draw on these tools to increase fire safety. The DAI&C Working Group works towards progress in research, education, and communications within this topic. In 2023, they wrote a white paper that explains the DAI&C landscape in relation to fire engineering, and outlines research priorities for the next 10 years.
Interested in joining the DAI&C Working Group? Explore Partnership Options.
Representative topics in this area include:
- Use of cloud-based home/consumer devices to pinpoint fire origins
- Drawing on cell phones to develop smart egress systems
- Big data and AI-technologies to model building fires
- Data collection for fires
- Construction and management of fire database
- Advanced AI technologies
- Reliability and uncertainty of AI model
- Data mining to identify chemical process deviations
- Behavioral response to emergency notifications
- Combined fire and evacuation models
- Behavior based models
- Cultural
- Pre-evacuation time
- Actions other than evacuating
- Risk/probabilistic models of Human Behavior regarding:
- Residential buildings
- Large populations
- Community level
- High-challenge environments
- Quantifying the level of “life safety” in a building
- Effects of fire on visibility and gases
- Impact of public education on fire risk
- Building information modeling
- Smart buildings
- Improved test methods
- Integrated FP systems and building connectivity
- Smart firefighting
- IoT integration
- Mechanical augmentation
- Fire department communication with BIM
- Firefighter tracking and location
- Automated, quantifiable exposure monitoring
- Massively parallel computing
- Digital recordings of distributed control systems and programmable logic controllers
- Digital data collection (black boxes)
- Fire scene identification based on computer vision technologies:
- Identification of building dimensions, fire location, and sizes
- Overview of large scenes from drones
- Linking of 3D scanning technology with computer fire models
- Methods to preserve evidence
- Tools to extract data from digital sources
- Improved software to create multiple-source dynamic event timelines
- Simulation tools to recreate process conditions in chemical plants
- Advanced calculation methods to evaluate hypothesis
- Tools to estimate damage effects
- Virtual reality/augmented reality to describe and test scenarios
- Potential ethic issues (cybersecurity, privacy, models based on AI)