The University of Essex announced that it’s engaged in a first of its kind project in India using AI and analytics to better fight the forest fires in Uttarakhand. The landmark project is funded by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and led by a team of multi-disciplinary experts at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Lucknow (IIIT-L) and the University of Essex.  

Dr Haider Raza, from the School of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, University of Essex, is leading the project with Dr Vishal Krishna Singh, Dr Niharika Anand (expert in Wireless Sensor Networks, 4G and 5G technologies & IoT) and Dr Soumendu Chakraborty(expert in Image Processing, Computer Vision & Medical Image Analysis) from IIIT-L, actively supporting.  

The team has completed a comprehensive analysis of underlying reasons for forest fires in the Pauri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand and will deploy an AI-enabled IoT kit to protect the forest from fires through wireless monitoring systems. In the long term it will explore the feasibility of combining IoT sensors and drone-based image capturing to predict forest fires, map species distribution and poaching routes. 

Talking of the project, Dr Haider Raza, Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, University of Essex, said, “The analysis of Wireless Sensor and IoT device outputs have given us a view of the reasons behind existing approaches being ineffective. We have developed an event intensity mathematical model to specifically discriminate multiple acoustic events in a forest region.  

“We are also looking to develop an event detection algorithm that can accurately report multiple acoustic events and a data classification algorithm on top of it for accurate inference and decision making. The team at IIIT-L have been very helpful and brought numerous expert inputs to the project in every area which has been invaluable. Would like to thank GCRF for their unstinted support which has been instrumental in the project’s progress so far. We have recently disseminated a research manuscript to communicate the findings, which will be open access for better reach especially in developing countries such as India. Our proposed solutions are addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 13, 15 and 17.” 

Dr Vishal Krishna Singh said: “The primary goal of our research group is to propose solutions for problems which affect human and animal life. Forest fires are one such issue and we aim to develop a cost-effective and accurate solution for preventing it. The GCRF funding for this project has been a great help not only to explore this domain but also to disseminate the findings to the researchers. The funding helped us to hire research associates for working on the research problem. The funding from GCRF also supported a five-day workshop, where researchers from India and the UK shared their useful insights in Machine Learning; Internet of Things and Wireless Sensor Networks. We look forward to working in future with GCRF support in addressing other socio-economic issues such as animal poaching, water quality among others.”