More than 200 product managers, engineers and designers will gather at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley for a ShipSummit impact lab to explore how AI can help avalanche forecasting data.
Rise8 Vice President of Enablement Adam Furtado said the three-day workshop is a way for people to better understand how AI can be used in meaningful ways.
“We saw the shift of needing to move into using more AI skills and capabilities,” he told KPCW on the “Local News Hour” March 30. “We put this event together to bring government practitioners together here in Park City, where they're going to learn in real time how to use new AI skills to build a variety of products and technologies.”
The lab, titled “Operation Avalanche,” is part of Rise8’s ShipSummit, which aims to solve real-world challenges through hands-on, team-based training.
This week’s lab comes after a winter that saw deadly avalanches during Utah’s February storm.
The Utah Avalanche Center’s special project leader Chad Brackelsberg said in the winter, forecasters mine through data from weather stations, field reports and ski resorts to create their daily forecasts. He hopes AI can help with that data collection.
“Maybe there's a way that AI can help pre process some of that data. Maybe it can start looking at weather stations ahead of time and flagging what conditions existed, saying, ‘Hey, an east wind blew here. So be aware,’” he said. “Different things like that, that we might miss or might take us longer in the morning to find ourselves.”
Furtado said the goal of the workshop is not to take humans out of the equation.
“The application here will always be human centric,” he said. “The thing we're trying to get to is really allowing humans to make judgment calls. What we're trying to do is use the technology to make those decisions easier and be more data fruitful, if you will.”
The Utah Avalanche Center will join Rise8 and other participants in Park City at the ShipSummit March 31 to April 2 to learn how the center can modernize the forecasting process.
The avalanche center ended its regular daily forecasts March 29. It will continue to publish reports online intermittently through April, conditions permitting.
