GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — We heard quite a bit about unknown flying objects and suspected Chinese spy balloons earlier this year — but how did officials actually track down these objects? A Northeast Wisconsin artificial intelligence company played a key role in that part of the story.
Synthetaic, a company that works with TitletownTech, developed a tool called RAIC (Rapid Automated Image Categorization). It’s different from other AI technology.
“Instead of training AI the traditional way — which takes thousands of people drawing boxes on images so that a computer can learn to draw boxes on, say, balloons and images — what our company does is, we’ve developed a tool called RAIC and it allows you to actually start with no labeled data at all,” explained Synthetaic Founder and CEO Corey Jaskolski. “You don’t need that human training in the beginning to teach an AI, so we can do things like hand draw something, feed it into our AI, and it can find all of those things in the real actual imagery.”
While idly sitting on his couch, Jaskolski wondered if the tool would allow him to find the Chinese balloon.
“So, I was sitting on the couch and I thought, ‘You know, we have our tool RAIC and we have all this satellite data from Planet, a satellite company.’ I thought, ‘Could we possibly find this Chinese balloon in the data set?’” said Jaskolski. “And I thought it was really a longshot, but we uploaded the data for all of South Carolina and, actually, in two minutes with a hand drawing, we found the balloon.”
From just a thought on the couch to a crude hand drawing, Jaskolski was able to trace the balloon all the way back to its origin.
He worked with The New York Times to detect and analyze the balloon in satellite images captured by Planet Labs. Through this work, Synthetaic became the first to track the balloon itself, not just its expected path.
Jaskolski says the tech can be used for a wide variety of applications, particularly time-sensitive situations. Synthetaic has also worked with National Geographic to find rare species and helps the United Nations in its search and rescue efforts.
