Artificial Intelligence air pollution system launched in Johannesburg, 120 more yet to be dispatched. Image: The Conversation
(The Post News)- South Africa’s local scientists has launched its first-of-its-kind air quality monitoring system to monitor air pollution hotspots in real-time. This system is called Ai_r, it has a combination of air quality sensors with an Internet of Things network and artificial intelligence.
Bruce Mellado, director of Institute for Collider Particle Physics at the University of Witwatersrand says the project initiated after the institute flagged a lack of local systems to track sir pollution. He states the air quality systems are being imported currently and they have designed a complete system from scratch which is assembled in the country.
According to the South African Air Quality Information System, there are 130 big air quality measuring stations in South Africa which only measures the air quality in their vicinity. Mellado says this is the reason they need cost-effective, dense networks made up of Ai_r systems set up all around these stations, to measure air quality in a much wider area.
Being part of the project, 25 particle physicists from the iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator Based Sciences were trained at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is one of the world’s largest centre for scientific research, which is based on the Franco-Swiss border.
Mellado states the AI features are present in the modelling and forecasting of the device is a cost-effective alternative to traditional methods. He says AI does not do magic, it is a bunch of mathematical tools that are controlled by scientists to perform a task, it then integrates sets of data, learns from it and creates automatic models, saving a tremendous amount of resources.
Twenty devices have been already been placed in Soweto and Braamfontein in June, and has about120 more yet to be installed around Gauteng in the upcoming months, these have been said they use little to no electricity. These areas were chosen because of the high number of vehicles that through them daily, which creates higher risk of air pollution.
In 2019, the WHO has reported that air pollution for at least 25 800 premature deaths in the country, having the first highest number of deaths linked to particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) in Africa, with the recent data from the WHO, it indicates that almost 99% of the world’s population air that exceeds the organisation’s guideline levels. This indicates the higher air quality index value, the greater the level of air pollution and the higher risk of poor health conditions.
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