Designing a Human-centered AI Tool for Proactive Incident Detection Using Crowdsourced Data Sources to Support Emergency Response

Abstract

Time of incident reporting is a critical aspect of emergency response. However, the conventional approaches to receiving incident reports have time delays. Non-traditional sources such as crowdsourced data present an opportunity to detect incidents proactively. However, detecting incidents from such data streams is challenging due to inherent noise and data uncertainty. Naively maximizing detection accuracy can compromise spatial-temporal localization of inferred incidents, hindering response efforts. This article presents a novel human-centered AI tool to address the above challenges. We demonstrate how crowdsourced data can aid incident detection while acknowledging associated challenges. We use an existing CROME framework to facilitate training and selection of best incident detection models, based on parameters suited for deployment. The human-centered AI tool provides a visual interface for exploring various measures to analyze the models for the practitioner's needs, which could help the practitioners select the best model for their situation. Moreover, in this study, we illustrate the tool usage by comparing different models for incident detection. The experiments demonstrate that the CNN-based incident detection method can detect incidents significantly better than various alternative modeling approaches. In summary, this research demonstrates a promising application of human-centered AI tools for incident detection to support emergency response agencies.