USC Engineers Partner with Cal Fire to Develop AI Tool for Wildfire Origin Tracing
Engineers at the University of Southern California (USC) are collaborating with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) to create an artificial intelligence (AI) tool named GenFire. This tool aims to accurately identify the ignition point of wildfires and reconstruct their spread during the initial 24 hours. The project, supported by a grant from the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior’s Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), seeks to overcome current challenges in wildfire investigations, which often rely on time-consuming physical evidence and limited satellite data. GenFire will be trained using environmental data such as wind, temperature, humidity, terrain, and vegetation, alongside fire detection observations. The AI will work backward from observed fire spread to generate possible scenarios of how the fire developed, ultimately pinpointing the most probable ignition area. The research team plans to validate GenFire against approximately 100 historical wild...
