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George Mason University’s Center for Resilient & Sustainable Communities (C-RASC) is working with the Fairfax County Department of Public Safety Communications (DPSC) to implement AI and possibly forever change the way 9-1-1 operators are trained.
Funded by a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), C-RASC started working with Fairfax’s DPSC in 2024. The goal was to implement AI to improve the resiliency of the county’s emergency response system, using AI to assist 9-1-1 operators by answering calls.
But Kathy Laskey, professor emerita of Systems Engineering and Operations Research, said, “There are all kinds of legal and other sticky issues with putting AI on the phone with people calling 9-1-1.” The researchers pivoted quickly. “The DPSC told us that where they could use help is training, because operators need a lot of practice in taking calls before they actually respond to real callers.”
Training is very labor-intensive in a 9-1-1 call center, and typically an instructor will play the role of a 9-1-1 caller and improvise a call scenario from a large scenario booklet, with the trainee responding and getting feedback on the responses they give.
The Conversational AI-assisted Scenario Training System developed by the George Mason faculty together with industry partners and guided by DPSC is very sophisticated in generating realistic scenario calls and is customizable. “Trained in part on the scenario booklet being fed into this AI system, the scenario narration by the voicebot is done in such a way that it mimics a wide range of typical caller behavior,” said Hemant Purohit, associate professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology and director of the Humanitarian Informatics Lab.
Lin Wells, executive advisor to C-RASC, added, “Each caller may have a different situation, and the training staff helped us identify those variables in terms of the components they want trainees to practice.”
The project team is enhancing the system in several ways. One is by incorporating various difficulty levels so the system can be used both for new employees and as a refresher for existing staff. Another is to add realism, such as the sounds of passing cars in a scenario involving a traffic accident. Another enhancement is to include diverse speech patterns, such as accents, different tones of voice, language, and other real-world challenges the operators face.
Purohit said the team attended the NIST Public Safety Innovation Summit Conference (5 x 5) in Seattle recently and got a very positive response. A 9-1-1 communications and training coordinator from another state, who had 27 years of work in public safety and received this year’s award at the conference, said the technology was the best she had seen.
Laskey added that Fairfax County also has been very supportive. “I taught at George Mason for 32 years and I've worked on a lot of research projects. I've never before in my life demonstrated a software project to a client where the recipients applauded when we were done”
Perhaps the most important endorsement of all came from the 9-1-1 training instructors, who were impressed with how well the AI callers mimicked real-life situations and how this could save them hours of training.
The other project team members include Paul Houser, professor and executive director of C-RASC, and Karina Korostelina, professor and director of the Sustainable Peace Lab at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. Korostelina is leading the project’s community engagement study, which has involved interviews with Fairfax County citizens. Her findings showed the barriers to effective 9-1-1 services include language, delays with interpreter access, limited public understanding of emergency-vs.-non-emergency use, rigid questioning protocols, human error, and the need for more experience in handling mental health crises.
“The increase in adaptive capacity of new technologies requires deep considerations for micro-dynamics of identity and power in communities,” she said. “To build this capacity as a part of community resilience, the project will co-design the systemic approach for community engagement, including public education campaigns using schools, libraries, media, and community workshops to teach the difference between emergency and non-emergency calls and how to conduct emergency calls more efficiently.”
The project team is supported by doctoral students Ramya S. Nayaka and Hamad Edhah Yaslam Aldhlea from the College of Engineering and Computing and the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution respectively, as well as industry partners OmniBot Advisors and BlueHorse Digital.
In addition to working with Fairfax County on a possible continuation of the project the group is exploring academic-industry partnerships and preparing to discuss possibilities for commercialization with the university’s Office of Technology Transfer.