Artificial Intelligence to Help Disaster Aid Coordination

by Kieran Dodds, SciDev.net 

 A consortium of universities and private firms in the United Kingdom is working on the ORCHID project, which aims to use artificial intelligence to streamline disaster response. The need for such a project was evidenced by splintered relief efforts in November in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, the group says.

The ORCHID project will merge human and artificial intelligence into an efficient complementary unit known as a Human Agent Collective (HAC). The team is creating computer systems that will direct surveillance drones, resource management, and search planning, says David Jones, head of Rescue Global, the disaster response organization that will test the software next year.

“Coordination of such a large response [after a disaster] is so challenging without technological assistance that makes data more accessible,” Jones says. “Bringing humans and artificial intelligence together is the only way to get the job done better.” Computers can parse large volumes of information generated during an emergency from local status reports, social media, and various organizations involved in the relief effort.

HAC systems can collect and analyze large amounts of data in real time to flexibly implement disaster response activities.For HAC systems to be successful, this division of labour must be accounted for and the right balance found between artificial and human input, says Sarvapali Ramchurn, ORCHID applications theme leader from the UK-based University of Southampton.

He believes that the field trials in the Bay of Bengal planned for next year will go a long way towards showing how effective HACs can be, and pave the way for a big impact in the future.

Although exact details of the tests have not been finalized, how the complex algorithms cope with analyzing environmental data coming in from sensors and social media, as well as their ability to assess the quality of this information will likely be scrutinized, he says.

Judging the reliability of a source is particularly important in developing nations, where information coming in from the local population is primarily text-based and therefore much harder to verify than when images are available from smartphones, adds Ramchurn.

Andrej Verity, an emergency manager from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, agrees that any HAC-based system must work well using basic information, such as text messages and emails, if it is to function accurately in less developed nations. But he is sceptical such software will be readily adopted by disaster relief actors.

“All the big humanitarian organisations already have their own procedures and software systems, so trying to do something bigger and bring collaboration across organizations on a technical level is extremely difficult,” says Verity.

Ramchurn, however, believes disaster response agencies are growing increasingly open to new technology, and so it is not unreasonable to assume they will be willing to participate in HACs in the future.  Video and report

DCL: Future real time disaster response systems  must involve sophisticated CEP techniques.  These systems are called Holistic Event Processing Systems in my book, “Event Processing for Business”.