Path and Focus

Kaileen and Jonathan reflect on that past 10+ months of this Path and Focus journey in the last episode of season one! Join us as we explore some of the struggles and successes that have come out of this venture into wildfire technology.

Jonathan sits down for a candid conversation with Bruce Morrow, a professional forester with 40 years of experience in wildfire suppression and fuel management. They talk about everything from the 15 year pine beetle epidemic in BC, to how fire suppression can actually make for even worse fire seasons. Bruce also gives real time feedback on the Beacon app.

Another very special guest is joining Jonathan on the podcast today, and this time it's Avvai, one of the wonderful developers who's helped bring Beacon to life! Avvai shares how much she's learned about wildfire, software development and product design, and what features she hopes to see implemented in Beacon in the future.

Kaileen bought a tiny home! And is now experiencing herself what so many other home buyers in BC have this summer... being unable to purchase house insurance because of (perceived) risk of wildfire. We revisit how this was one of the initial motivations for starting our wildfire technology startup company, and then continue brainstorming ideas on how to get more Beacon users and mo

Jonathan shares a project he worked on over the weekend that involved converting the Canadian Air Quality Health Index & the Air Quality Index that Purple Air sensors use in order to find a more accurate reading that adequately accounts for woodsmoke. Then, he and Kaileen explore different ways to start gauging interest in Beacon's premium features!

Kaileen and Jonathan explore some fire danger rating edge case bugs that were accidentally stumbled upon, and how using something called biogeoclimatic zones could change the game for getting more accurate work restrictions!

We've got Chris Foster, Two Story Robot's own Chief Technology Officer and resident machine learning expert in the studio to set some things straight. Why can't we just slap a little machine learning on everything? What is the potential for it in the wildfire management space?? And the question we're all curious to know... is ML coming for our jobs??? (spoiler alert: it's not!)

Jonathan shares some early feedback we've received on Beacon, then he and Kaileen dive into the last few question marks they have yet to figure out before officially launching, and how they even validated this app months back.

Kaileen and Jonathan do their best to explain why machine learning is evidently far more difficult than they'd hoped, and what this means for our pursuit of up-to-date fire weather data. Then we explore the vast world of language- specifically ableist language and wildfire jargon.

Today, we start off by clarifying what the relationship is between the two companies, Path and Focus & Two Story Robot, then we get right into the heart of today's episode: our struggles with getting consistent, up to date weather data. Where should we pull the data from? How do we account for days where the data is not available?? Is machine learning the answer???