Collaborative Research: FW-HTF-P: Assistive Artificial Intelligence for Diversifying and Reskilling the Disaster Management Workforce of the Future

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Disaster impacts, which have become more frequent and severe due to climate change, disproportionately hurt vulnerable populations, including women, communities of color, people with disabilities, income-challenged communities, and more generally those who are not able to advocate for themselves. People from these populations are also poorly represented in the disaster-management profession. This fact raises risks that disaster-management practices do not align with the needs of the broader community, and that biases in hiring and resource allocation will reinforce these vulnerabilities. The goal of this project is to increase disaster-management job opportunities for people from these vulnerable groups. Through connecting residents, community leaders, and state and local authorities, this project will result in new knowledge about how human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the disaster-management profession by contributing to the diversification and reskilling of the workforce, ultimately augmenting human capabilities, and leading to culturally sensitive teams and equitable disaster-management practices.The technical aims of the project center around a series of interconnected planning activities that foster a convergent research roadmap, develop fundamental research concepts, and stimulate research capacity that address technological, human, societal, and economic dimensions of the field of disaster management. The project team will study, formalize, and demonstrate the potential of AI to promote diversity and inclusion in disaster-management workforce and practices. Through active participation of stakeholders who will form an advisory board, the project team will engage residents and leaders from disaster-prone communities, state and local disaster-management agencies, and domain experts and researchers to develop a comprehensive roadmap that will guide the design, testing, and dissemination of assistive AI technologies for the disaster-management profession. Planning activities will include a workshop on diversity and inclusion in disaster management, a stakeholder meeting and demonstrations, and research working groups and collaboration meetings. Together, these activities will help meet three research objectives: (1) Facilitate multidisciplinary research and stakeholder partnerships that employ the joint perspectives, methods, and knowledge of disaster management, learning sciences, computer science, engineering, workforce training, and the social sciences; (2) Impart deeper understanding of human-AI partnership in disaster management that can augment (not replace) human workers, including consideration of workforce diversity and how to impart skills needed to interact with AI; and (3) Understand, anticipate, and explore ways of mitigating potential technological and societal risks resulting from AI integration into disaster-management workforce training and reskilling.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.