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CES, Robotics & AI

“The Impact of Alphabet X’s Bellwether AI on Foreseeing Natural Disasters”

The Google parent’s moonshot factory X this week officially unveiled Project Bellwether, its latest bid to apply technology to some of our biggest problems. Here that means using AI tools to identify natural disasters like wildfire and flooding as quickly as possible. “Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” the Guard’s Col. Brian McGarry notes. Google has been exploring the use of machine learning models and AI to predict natural disasters for some time now. Project Bellwether’s partnership with the National Guard could well prove an important validation of that work.

Dylan Williams
April 17, 2024

Apps

Mermaid Chart secures a staggering $7.5 million investment with its Markdown-inspired diagramming tool.

Mermaid, the open source diagramming and charting tool, has long been popular with developers for its ability to create diagrams using a Markdown-like language. They were watching ‘The Little Mermaid.’ That’s why I named that eight years ago.”Early on, Mermaid was mostly about flowcharts, but over time Sveidqvist added other diagram types — and the community quickly made it its own, too. Firestone told me that the cloud version of the open source project had 4 million users last year. That’s a market Mermaid Chart is looking to address by building easier-to-use tools for this group of users. “Mermaid Chart is expanding the community by bringing the benefits of Mermaid to all types of business users, leveraging AI as a catalyst.