Matt O’Brien
Shortly after sunrise on Saturday, the satellite set up a long-range camera in Mandalay, Myanmar. Not too far from the epicenter of Friday’s 7.7 magnitude earthquake, it devastated Southeast Asia’s second largest city.
The mission was to combine with artificial intelligence technology to capture images that would help rescue organizations quickly assess how many buildings have collapsed, severely damaged, and where helpers are most needed.
At first, the high-tech computer vision approach was not working.
“The biggest challenge in this particular case was clouds,” said Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist at Microsoft. “There’s no way to see the clouds with this technology.”
The clouds eventually moved, and it took another satellite from San Francisco-based Planet Labs to capture the aerial photographs and send them to Microsoft’s Charitable AI for Good Lab. By then, it was already around 11pm on Friday at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. A group of Microsoft workers were ready and waiting for data.
AI For Good Lab has previously performed this type of AI support loss assessment. We tracked down the devastating 2023 floods in Libya or wildfires in Los Angeles this year. However, rather than relying on a standard AI computer vision model that can run visual data, we had to build a customized version unique to Mandalay.
“The Earth is so different, natural disasters are different, and the images obtained from satellites are so different to work in any situation,” La Vista Ferez said. For example, while fires spread in a rather predictable way, they said, “Earthquakes touch the entire city.”
Upon completion of the AI analysis, 515 buildings in Mandalay showed 80% to 100% damage, and 1,524 with 20% to 80% damage. It showed extensive gravity in the disaster, but equally important, it helps to identify the location of specific damage.
“This is important information for the team on the ground,” La Vista Ferez said.
Microsoft warned that “it should serve as a preliminary guide and requires ground verification for a full understanding.” But in the meantime, tech companies have shared their analytics with aid groups such as the Red Cross.
Planet Labs says its satellites — 15 of them orbiting Earth — have been filming around 12 locations in Myanmar and Thailand since shivering Friday.
Original issue: March 31, 2025, 5:20pm EDT
