By Stephanie Kanowitz
Apr 29, 2021
Members of Montgomery County, Md.’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) are using an artificial intelligence-based system to find COVID-related items in Twitter posts that may call for action.
As part of research by a team from Brigham Young University (BYU), George Mason University (GMU), the University of Texas (UT) at Austin and Virginia Tech University, CERT volunteers -- dubbed the Virtual Emergency Response Team (VERT) -- are tagging tweets based on relevance to help train the AI to recognize data that indicates a situation that emergency response may want to know about.
Under a grant from the National Science Foundation to study human-AI teaming in emergency response, the researchers had been studying how the AI platform, called CitizenHelper, would work during natural disasters. Last fall, though, they shifted to focus on COVID-19 and spent six months studying tweets posted in the National Capital Region that could indicate COVID-risky behavior, such as indoor venues without strict mask enforcement.