CIVIC-PG Track B: Creating an AI-based Community-wide Efficient and Equitable Response System

With a growing number of requests and national labor shortages in city governments and contracted services, the need for efficient, easily accessible, and equitable response systems is more urgent than ever. To address this need, this university-community collaboration aims to revolutionize the next generation of emergency services by applying state-of-the-art AI techniques to response systems that will reduce emergency response times while increasing their accessibility and equity. To do so, this project takes the following steps: 1) automate responses to non-emergency requests and thus ensuring 9-1-1 dispatchers are available to provide quick assistance to those who may be adversely affected by emergencies; 2) precisely ascertain emergency response times, which can maximize the efficiency of the placement of stations and response units and potentially result in an improved (insurance services) ISO rating and lower insurance rates for the citizens and businesses, 3) extract on-scene information to support first-responders operations to save lives and time during emergencies, and 4) create a community-centric approach to ensure equitable and trustworthy emergency and non-emergency response systems. This planning grant aims to identify sources of inefficiency, inequity, and inaccessibility present in existing emergency and non-emergency response systems and remedy them by developing novel AI-based interventions. In this planning effort, the project team consisting of university researchers, public safety professionals, and community partners is collaborating with members of underserved communities to identify crucial bottlenecks in the response system that reduce efficiency, equity, and accessibility of these systems. The vision is to develop prototypes of interventions to address these bottlenecks using principled techniques from AI and data-driven learning. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.