FIRST RESPONDERSChatGPT Could Help First Responders During Natural Disasters
A little over a year since its launch, ChatGPT’s abilities are well known. The machine learning model can write a decent college-level essay and hold a conversation in an almost human-like way. But could its language skills also help first responders find those in distress during a natural disaster?
A little over a year since its launch, ChatGPT’s abilities are well known. The machine learning model can write a decent college-level essay and hold a conversation in an almost human-like way.
But could its language skills also help first responders find those in distress during a natural disaster?
A new UB-led study trains ChatGPT to recognize locations, from home addresses to intersections, in disaster victims’ social media posts.
Supplied with carefully constructed prompts, researchers’ “geoknowledge-guided” GPT models extracted location data from tweets sent during Hurricane Harvey at an accuracy rate 76% better than default GPT models.
“This use of AI technology may be able to help first responders reach victims more quickly and even save more lives,” says Yingjie Hu, associate professor in the Department of Geography, College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, which was published in October in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.
Disaster victims have frequently turned to social media to plead for help when 911 systems become overloaded, including during Harvey’s devastation of the Houston area in 2017.
Yet first responders often don’t have the resources to monitor social media feeds during a disaster, following the various hashtags and deciding which posts are most urgent.
It is the hope of the UB-led research team, which also includes collaborators from the University of Georgia, Stanford University and Google, that their work could lead to AI systems that automatically process social media data for emergency services.
“ChatGPT and other large language models have drawn controversy for their potential negative uses, whether it be academic fraud or eliminating jobs, so it is exciting to instead harness their powers for social good,” Hu says.
“While there are a number of significant and valid concerns about the emergence of ChatGPT, our work shows that careful, interdisciplinary work can produce applications of this technology that can provide tangible benefits to society,” adds co-author Kenneth Joseph, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Fusing ‘Geoknowledge’ into ChatGPT
Imagine a tweet with an urgent but clear message: A family, including a 90-year-old not steady on their feet, needs rescuing at 1280 Grant St., Cypress, Texas, 77249.
