There are many ways industries can take advantage of geospatial analytics in the areas of environmental hazards. Governments and the department of public works can derive actionable insights on public health and weather conditions to better advise the public during a pandemic or a natural disaster such as wildfires. For example, you can identify a COVID- positive patient in public spaces, such as airports or hospitals, without compromising the privacy of the affected individual and alert the respective authorities and the public in the vicinity for necessary safety measures.

In the military and on battlefields, you can use AI inferencing on the edge as wearable devices to track soldier health, monitor driver behavior, and alert authorities on the safety and associated risks of approaching military vehicles while preserving and protecting the privacy of soldiers. The future of the military is going high-tech with the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) and the Internet of Military Things (IoMT) for wearable combat gear that help soldiers identify enemies and perform better in battle by using rapid edge computing. Protecting and preserving visual data collected from edge devices such as drones and wearable gears is crucial to keep hackers and the enemy at bay.

Noncombatant evacuation operations (NEOs) are conducted by the DoD to assist in evacuating US citizens and nationals, DoD civilian personnel, and designated persons (host nation (HN) and third-country nationals (TCNs)) whose lives are in danger to an appropriate safe haven. The administrative controls in place use largely manual evacuee screening processes. However, the accuracy, security, and speed of evacuee identification, evacuee tracking, and threat screening could potentially be improved by using highly automated AI/ML tools combined with AI/ML video obfuscation technologies.

Image processing is used to diagnose pathologies for surgical planning from 3D images obtained from computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). HIPAA privacy rules govern how data must be collected, processed, and erased by organizations for all personal information and digital images like photographs. For data to qualify as sharable under the HIPAA Safe Harbor regulations, full-face photographic images and any comparable images must be removed. Automated techniques like de-identification or skull‐stripping algorithms used to obscure an individual's facial features from structural CT/MR images have become an essential part of the data sharing process for biomedical research institutions.

Enterprise customers have traditionally trained and deployed AI/ML models on-premises. For economies of scale and efficiency reasons, these customers are expanding to move AI/ML functions into public, hybrid, or multi-cloud cloud deployments. However, they are bound by what data can be exposed to other infrastructures. NetApp solutions address a full range of cybersecurity threats required for data protection and security assessment and, when combined with Protopia data transformation, minimize the risks associated with migrating image processing AI/ML workloads to the cloud.

For additional use cases for edge computing and AI inferencing across other industries, see TR-4886 AI Inferencing at the Edge and the NetApp AI blog, Intelligence versus privacy.