Episode 258: Harnessing the Power of the Human Brain and AI in Public Safety with Craig Lawton

Episode notes

How has Amazon Web Services (AWS) made an impact on the first responder industry?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s role in emergency management platforms and smart city solutions

The potential of AI, IoT, and satellite technology in improving public safety outcomes

The importance of storytelling and communication when implementing tech solutions

Hear from Craig Lawton - the Principal AI & Data Technologist for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Craig shares insights into the company's role at the AFAC event in Sydney and their contributions to the smart city space. He explains how AWS supports emergency management platforms by providing flexible cloud computing capabilities that adapt to the needs of first responders.

Craig discusses various applications of AWS in public safety, from fire notification systems to AI-powered analysis of camera footage and river flow predictions. He also explores the future potential of IoT and low-Earth orbit satellite technology in enhancing public safety. The episode wraps up with Craig emphasizing the importance of communication and storytelling in the successful adoption of new technologies.

So take a listen to hear what he has to share!

Episode Resources:

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro from the IFE booth at AFAC 2024
2. 0:55 Craig Lawton joins
3. 0:58 Why AWS is at AFAC
4. 1:41 AWS and emergency management platforms
5. 3:28 Drones connected to the cloud
6. 4:06 Use cases from local councils
7. 5:58 Camera footage and river flow predictions
8. 6:34 The new wave of AI and public safety
9. 9:07 IoT and the Internet of Things
10. 10:00 Satellites and Amazon Kuiper
11. 10:57 What the IFE means to AWS
12. 12:40 Craig's podcast, Building a Better Geek
13. 14:33 Storytelling and tech adoption
14. 15:28 Final words: humans are really impressive
15. 16:15 Wrap

Questions answered in this episode

Why is AWS a good fit for emergency management platforms?

Craig Lawton explains that cloud computing provides elastic availability of compute when you need it on demand. Emergency systems like fire notification applications might only face peak load a few days a year, but they must work and scale when hundreds of thousands of people try to access them during high fire risk days.

Hear it at 1:47

How is Queensland using AI to monitor flooded roads?

Craig Lawton describes a system built by the Local Council Association of Queensland that uses cameras on remote roads and AI to analyze footage automatically. The AI model was trained on over half a million images of flooded roads and can detect whether a road is flooded with about 98.6% accuracy, without sending anyone out to check.

Hear it at 4:08

What emerging technologies does Craig Lawton see as transformational for public safety?

He highlights Internet of Things sensors, which are becoming more powerful and cheaper, allowing data collection in remote locations. He also points to low-earth orbit satellite solutions like Amazon Kuiper, which will enable broadband speed connections anywhere in Australia and allow emergency equipment to communicate from areas previously out of reach.

Hear it at 9:09

What is the difference between traditional AI and generative AI?

Craig Lawton says traditional AI is good at discovering patterns and making predictions, such as analyzing road camera images to detect flooding. Generative AI, which became prominent last year, is a new type that allows you to create content and have natural language conversations.

Hear it at 6:35

What lesson did Craig Lawton learn about communication in grade six?

His school principal asked the class what the most important thing to learn in life was, and instead of maths or English, wrote up communication. Craig Lawton says that lesson stuck with him, and he believes communication done poorly is at the root of many problems, but done well it opens possibilities.

Hear it at 14:35

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 258 transcript

Harnessing the Power of the Human Brain and AI in Public Safety with Craig Lawton

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Craig Lawton

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to a mini Smart Firefighting podcast series, recorded live at the Institute of Fire Engineers booth during the 2024 AFAC Show Down Under in Sydney, Australia. Throughout these conversations, we dive into critical issues like fire safety, emerging technologies, diversity in the fire service, and innovative solutions for emergency response. with these fascinating insights from leaders around the world on how we can build a safer and more resilient future. Craig Lawton, principal AI and data technologist at AWS, explains how cloud computing and AI are transforming public safety, from fire notification systems to analyzing camera footage and river flow predictions. He also discusses the future of IoT, satellite technology, and the importance of storytelling and technology adoption. Craig Lawton from AWS. Craig, how you doing?

[0:56] Craig Lawton: I'm doing well yourself.

[0:57] Kevin Sofen: Doing quite well. So what brings you to AFAC in Sydney today?

[1:02] Craig Lawton: We sponsored the event last year. We had such a good time and I missed out last year. So I was chatting to Steve, who does a lot of our organization. So I want to come up. So a few years ago, I did a lot of work in the smart city space and just love being around this expo hall, seeing all the toys on display. And also, you know, chatting to people about how they're connecting it to the digital side of the world as well.

[1:26] Kevin Sofen: So all things digital side, whether that is the inner space of software, whether it's the aspects of cloud computing. I feel like AWS has its hands on a few different things from, you know, we're sitting here in the IFE booth, the Institute of Fire Engineers booth. What is AWS's play with IFE and fire engineers?

[1:47] Craig Lawton: So we've got quite a long relationship with emergency management platforms because often, if you think about cloud computing, it's the elastic availability of cloud compute when you need it on demand. So a good example recently is the census, the national census that happens every four years. The last census was on AWS. It's a classic thing. It's not used the whole year and then all of a sudden on census day, tens of millions of people log on at once and it's got to work. A lot of the early work we did with emergency management were for fire notification applications that people had. Think about that the application can test, but then on the days of a higher fire risk, when you might have maybe only four days a year, it's got to work and it's got to scale. Maybe hundreds of thousands of people are trying to understand what the fire is. So the other thing is Amazon Web Services launched in 2006. It's almost 20 years to 18 years old. We've been doing this a long time and so we've invested a lot in the underlying data centres and regions and the availability and in the cloud providers. We have unmatched operational performance. We're really good at keeping things up. It's not perfect. We're always looking to improve. But this is really important for emergency management platforms, so they know that when they need a system, it's going to be there. And that system could be, as I said, notifications, could be collecting data. It could be a notification system. It could be something that's interfacing with a web app or a digital twin. I want to chat to the New South Wales Fire and Research. They just did a talk and showed off their drones that they were flying through. $1,800 drones from JB Hi-Fi, I want to get me one of those. Oh, wow. And connected to the cloud, yeah.

[3:29] Kevin Sofen: There's quite a bit of quadcopters and fixed drones at the show, as well as a lot of earth observation and satellite companies, and just kind of different ways to create data, synthesize that data, and then consume it in various ways. And I guess kind of building off that within the AWS component, I look at Amazon Web Services, AWS is sort of like a functional piece of the puzzle for different first responder operations. Are there any use cases or case studies that you could speak to about ways that AWS is plugged in within, whether it's within New South Wales or whether it's any application around the world of just AWS sort of being a piece of the first responder solution set?

[4:08] Craig Lawton: So a good example is the local council association at Queensland. They recently spoke at our Canberra symposium which we run every year in Canberra. They were looking at the challenges of flooded roads and remote locations, and they were using cameras, but the cameras were occasionally faulty. They had to send someone a four-hour drive to replace or turn a camera off and on again. So they support all the local governments in Queensland, LGAQ, and they wanted to build an AI-based platform that could analyse the camera footage coming back from the roads automatically inform their citizens if roads were impacted. And I think in early 2022, there was big flooding in New South Wales and Queensland. And in Queensland, I think 20,000 homes were impacted, about half a million people. So they were looking at how they could solve this problem. So they had the local councils install cameras. They found these cameras, which were about just over $2,000. The local councils ran, you know, maintained the cameras, which local councils are experienced at running that type of thing but the local council association built the back end that did the AI and they looked at I think over a half a million different images of flooded roads imported that into an AI model so they could get I think 98.6% accuracy in detecting whether a road was accurate without having to send anybody out there so provide that capability and it's rolled out over five of their local councils up there now. And especially it's an application of artificial intelligence to provide awareness, keep people safe, save time so people don't have to drive out and find out the road's blocked and drive back again.

[5:58] Kevin Sofen: A great use case example in terms of how you're leveraging AI tools from plugging a bunch of images in there to be able to then try and look for patterns. Yeah. And I think we were talking about last time, but the idea of maybe there's one other gentleman from a university in Melbourne, but the idea of how to leverage AI to purely just like detect abnormalities or kind of use it to understand patterns where it's, again, not AI is doing all the tasks, but sort of giving a red flag to be like, hey, this might be something we should check out. Any sort of, you know, anything like that or any other kind of AI, other applications that are kind of exciting you that you see are relevant for public safety?

[6:35] Craig Lawton: So AI has gone through a big inflection point last year. So there's a new type of AI, new kid on the block generative AI and generative AI is a new type of AI that allows you to create content and you can have natural language conversations, massive impact on technology market. Before that old school AI was really good at discovering patterns and doing predictions. So if you think about it doing the image analysis of the road cameras that's discovering whether the roads flooded by looking for patterns. Train it with thousands of, hundreds of thousands of images and then it'll be able to work it out for itself. Like when, you know, if you, I don't know if you have children, but when you have children and you explain to them, you know, what the difference between a cat and a dog is, they kind of might get it wrong for a while. And then after a while, you know, one of my kids always had trouble with yellow and green. And then, but after a while, just show enough examples, like these mathematical models are like that. I've seen the same solution actually. The Local Council Association of Queensland are looking at tracking river flows. So some of the remote areas where they can't get cameras, poor connectivity, they're using LIDAR that's based on lasers to detect the height of a river. But then as you collect that data over time, you can start to predict what ahead of time what the river height's going to be. It's not a public safety example, but Melbourne Water use this because they are Australia's largest provider of recycled water, and they wanted to be able to predict whether their water was going to be turbid and all churned out, whether it was going to be fit for sale. And they used a whole bunch of sensors, collected data, put it into a model, and they got to a point where they could predict three days in advance, I think with 80% accuracy, whether the water was going to be a quality to sell. So it helped them run their business. So lots of possibility in this space with AI to be able to predict based on past behavior. And also look for anomalies. Go, I expect this thing to do this, and all of a sudden it's outside. This is going to be good on the audio version where I'm wiggling my finger in the air.

[8:38] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, absolutely. And we got the max camera.

[8:42] Craig Lawton: Yeah. Go to YouTube.

[8:43] Kevin Sofen: I'll put a little infographic on there. The perfect audio wave by Craig. Well, so you touched on a few different aspects of AI and of course, AI is something where people are betting the farm on it. there's maybe a little bit of overzealous excitement on it. AI is a great tool, just like a rank chineer toolbox. What other emerging technologies are something that AWS is working on that excites you, particularly as it relates to public safety?

[9:09] Craig Lawton: So I think IoT technologies or Internet of Things, I think as devices get more powerful and cheaper, you'll be able to have more of them around. I think I mentioned the camera cost for the Queensland one, but you can get really low-cost centers that you can put in remote locations and collect data points on things. I get excited, I think, wouldn't it be great if we could put sensors up and down our major rivers and really understand what's happening in real time with some of our natural assets? I think super excited about that. The other thing I think is gonna be transformational is low-earth orbit satellite solutions. Amazon Kuiper is our low-earth orbit constellation, which is scheduled to be launched in the next, I think operational in the next couple of years. And the fact that you'll be able to connect from anywhere in Australia. with broadband speed connections, all of a sudden means that in an emergency situation, you could potentially land in all the equipment to collect, communicate, provide services to people impacted by a flood or a natural disaster, and also be able to get data out of areas that before were just, we live in a really big country. Yeah, so I think that's gonna be very exciting as well.

[10:28] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, that's awesome. I couldn't agree more in terms of the ways that satellites can help us continue to, whether it's detecting wildfires from space or helping us get the message out in previous comms, denied environments, a lot of use case and value there. And then I want to bring it back. I alluded to it a little bit at the beginning, but the Institute of Fire Engineers and AWS's alignment with the generous support of last night at the IFE gala, but just seems like there's like a strong alignment between IFE and AWS, which is awesome. which is awesome. In your words, what is the Institute of Fire Engineers, and why is it an important strategic relationship for Amazon?

[11:04] Craig Lawton: I'm part of the public sector, part of Amazon Web Services, and one of the exciting things about working in the public sector is you get to work with people who are trying to make the world a better place. I think technology goes through big waves, and I think I've been through a few of them, the things which were previously not viable, all of a sudden become viable because cloud allowed you to just spin up computing resources when you need it. And that then enabled all this innovation on top of the platform, AI, et cetera, and all these other capabilities. And so one of the exciting things I get to think about as we work with customers and like IFE and the organizations that you support is that we can often go in there and our understanding of technology, have those conversations, work backwards from some of the challenges that you have in these emergency environments, which we don't know about, but we know the technology side we hope pretty well. And we can come up with solutions which potentially weren't viable in the past, but now can be used to get better situational awareness like through digital twins, better notifications using services like a notification service so that we can save a life and make an impact on the communities in which AWS works. Yeah. So it's exciting. And also just as a fully grown boy, seeing all the trucks and fire trucks and drones around here, it gets you fired up.

[12:32] Kevin Sofen: I mean, just a round up. It's toys with life-saving applications.

[12:37] Craig Lawton: Yes. Yeah. Serious gear. I like it. Yeah.

[12:40] Kevin Sofen: And Craig, you told me last night, you have a podcast yourself.

[12:43] Craig Lawton: Yes, I did a season of a podcast earlier this year. I think we're going to start recording season two.

[12:50] Kevin Sofen: I hear there's high demand for a season two.

[12:52] Craig Lawton: There was, it's good to know, it's appreciated. I did it mainly because Emanuele Grace, who I've done the podcast with, we have a great professional relationship and her background is in voice production and professional coaching. My background is in technology and I think a lot of technologists are quite introverted people. And so the podcast is called Building a Better Geek. And it was about the intersection of technology and communication. So like we're doing here now, you know, can technologists get developed their communication skills? Can they develop the leadership skills? And yeah, we just have a lot of fun doing it. And I use almost the same gear as you. That's why I was asking about your camera because we're thinking about incorporating

[13:31] Kevin Sofen: a little DJI camera on spot and then the other little zoom and my whole little recording equipment bag is you know I fit in a small backpack and boom there you go the

[13:39] Craig Lawton: hardest thing is I do my own editing I've done some audio engineering and all the ums I put in oh it's it yeah I see them in the waveforms

[13:48] Kevin Sofen: oh I know I outsource my editing I learned I quickly learned on podcasting that maybe business card for me okay oh I got a guy

[13:56] Craig Lawton: you got a guy you got the guy yeah

[13:58] Kevin Sofen: his name is Felix I feel I never actually talked to Felix on the phone and only via messaging, but he's a great guy.

[14:04] Craig Lawton: Thanks, Felix.

[14:05] Kevin Sofen: Yeah.

[14:06] Craig Lawton: You're getting it cool.

[14:08] Kevin Sofen: Well, that's good. And then I went back to the essence of your podcast. I mean, I think it's really important of not just looking at and developing and pushing technology on the world for technology's sakes, but really understanding what problem are we solving? Why are we solving it? How can we really support public safety? And especially doing it in a cost-effective manner, you know, and really looking at the sociology and just the overall UI, UX, ergonomics of tech is really critical if you're actually gonna successfully bring new technology to market.

[14:35] Craig Lawton: Thanks for that. Yeah, there's, when I was in grade six, the principal of the school got up in front of our class. He came in to do a sort of a class and he said, what's the most important thing to learn in life? And everybody was like, you know, maths or English or, and he wrote up communication. And for some reason it stuck with me. I think communication when done poorly is at the root of a lot of our problems, but when it's done well, that really opens possibilities for improving the place.

[15:02] Kevin Sofen: And we humans have been storytelling for a long time, whether it was from drawing little animals and stick figures on cave walls to how we're leveraging trending reels on TikTok.

[15:14] Craig Lawton: It's all about the story. We love stories.

[15:15] Kevin Sofen: Oh, we love stories. Yeah. Well, that's a good story. Well, so final thing, Craig, of a final, whether it's a mic drop moment or any sort of quote or insight that you live by or something, whether it's personal life or Amazon related, anything you could leave us with here today.

[15:30] Craig Lawton: No, okay, just on the spur of the moment, a fascinating quote from Jeff Bezos, there you go. He was on another podcast, the Lex Fridman podcast. He hasn't done much in the way of, since he moved on from CIO, but he mentioned that how much power the human brain uses to do the same amount of work that some of these artificial models, artificial intelligence models use and said that human brain uses only about 20 watts energy to do things which take kilowatts of power for our models to do. And so I always think about that and go, wow, humans are really impressive.

[16:03] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, that's so you're saying we have more capacity to use in our brain too.

[16:08] Craig Lawton: We do. And so I think humans have a really important place to play. And we shouldn't discount how important we are.

[16:14] Kevin Sofen: Yeah. Great. Well said. Appreciate your time and look forward to staying in touch.

[16:19] Craig Lawton: No worries. Cheers.

[16:21] Kevin Sofen: Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode recorded alongside the Institute of Fire Engineers during the AFAC show. If you found value in the conversation or learned something new, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out, share your thoughts, and let's keep the discussion going on how we can shape the future of smart firefighting.