A team of researchers from the NSF NHERI SimCenter, a computational modeling and simulation center for the natural hazards engineering community based at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a suite of tools called BRAILS — Building Recognition using AI at Large-Scale — that can automatically identify characteristics of buildings in a city and even detect the risks that a city's structures would face in an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami. ,b>Charles (Chaofeng) Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead developer of BRAILS, says the project grew out of a need to quickly and reliably characterize the structures in a city.