CoastSight: Generative and Vision-Language AI for Disaster Intelligence

BY DR. AHMED IMTEAJ, DR. STEPHANIE WAKEFIELD, AND DR. JASON O. HALLSTROM

Keywords: generative artificial intelligence, vision-language models, text-to-video generation, smart cities and intelligent infrastructure, disaster intelligence

OUR RESEARCH

Extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes, storm surges, and wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe, yet high-quality disaster video data for training AI systems remains limited. This shortage makes it difficult to develop intelligent models that can accurately understand disaster scenes and support emergency response and urban planning.

This project addresses this challenge by generating realistic, AI-ready disaster videos and developing advanced vision-language AI models capable of understanding, describing, and reasoning about complex disaster scenarios. By transforming disaster videos into actionable intelligence, the project supports emergency management, infrastructure planning, and the development of more resilient coastal communities.

OUR STRATEGY

Students on the team will:

• Develop generative AI models that create realistic coastal disaster videos from text prompts.
• Train vision-language models to understand disaster scenes, summarize videos, and answer situational questions.
• Design disaster scenarios using GIS, urban planning, and environmental data to create realistic training datasets.
• Evaluate AI models that support emergency management and coastal resilience.

Students will build skills in generative AI, vision-language models, computer vision, video analytics, and geospatial AI.

OUR IMPACT

This project seeks to:

• Develop next-generation AI for disaster video understanding.
• Address the shortage of disaster data through synthetic data generation.
• Improve emergency preparedness and disaster response.
• Enable safer, smarter, and more resilient coastal communities.
• Provide students with hands-on experience in cutting-edge AI research.

This project combines generative AI and video intelligence to transform disaster data into actionable insights for resilient cities and sustainable coastal communities.

OUR TEAM

Ahmed Imteaj, PhD 
Stephanie Wakefield, PhD 
Jason O. Hallstrom, PhD  
Tags: vip