A three-year collaboration agreement has been signed between Ex Machina and CINECA as part of the AIRAS project, a decision support software tool for dealing with emergencies due to extreme weather events.
The goal of AIRAS (Artificial Intelligence Risk Assessment System) is to help land protection authorities, such as mayors, to deal with weather emergencies in an increasingly advanced way, particularly in areas with the highest flood and hydrogeological risk. Through knowledge of documents, decisions, and damages that have occurred during past catastrophic events, the language model underlying AIRAS suggests the most appropriate actions to reduce the risk of damage to people and infrastructure. For each suggested action, AIRAS compares the cost of taking action with the potential damage if no action is taken.
“We are excited to put our expertise in AI at the service of such an important and timely cause. AIRAS represents an extraordinary step forward in climate emergency management. Our technology, combined with CINECA’s computing power, allows us to create a tool that can make a difference in protecting the land and people,” said Sebastiano Cobianco, CEO of Ex Machina, a company specializing in developing software solutions for large companies and public administrations.
AIRAS is based on the COSMO 42 platform, designed and built by Ex Machina’s AI.lab. The agreement with CINECA aims to use one of the most advanced supercomputing infrastructures in Europe to deepen the training of COSMO 42 over new areas of the country and greater document volumes. In addition, COSMO 42’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture ensures a constantly updated repository of knowledge on the circumstances of extreme weather events, as well as the traceability of documentary sources underlying the actions suggested by AIRAS. Upon completion of the training, it is planned to release the results of the AIRAS project under an open-source license for the benefit of the scientific community and the national and European research system.
Alessandra Poggiani, Director General of CINECA, the main Italian inter-university consortium for supercomputing, said that “the agreement with Ex Machina confirms our commitment to AI issues at the service of the community. With AIRAS, mayors and local administrators have one more tool to make informed decisions in dealing with weather emergencies, based on knowledge of the territory and findings from similar events that have occurred in the past.”
Read more about our COSMO 42 platform here
Image above: Cineca’s Leonardo ranks among world’s most powerful supercomputers
