Artificial Intelligence to aid crises responders in UAE

Abu Dhabi: A“first of its kind” platform powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enhance the capabilities of authorities responding to crises and emergencies of all kinds in the UAE.

The National Emergency Crisis and Disaster Management Authority (NCEMA) described the project as a central command solution for smart management of incidents. Using a combination of AI, machine learning, and geospatial tools like digital twin, the platform will provide real-time information sharing during incidents such as fires and natural disasters, enabling better coordination between different humanitarian, emergency, medical, and citizen services for rapid response to incidents and to increase overall city resiliency and recovery.

Using computer vision as well as other sources of city data, the platform will give emergency services a wealth of real-time information, combined with collaboration and communications tools, for use during an incident.

Additionally, the platform can also be integrated with digital health records so that medical services are better prepared to help individual patients and improve outcomes.

Threat prediction

The platform’s capabilities will go beyond just addressing crises situations. It will work in the background to provide threat prediction of any possible secondary incidents that may occur and monitor the overall progress in response. Once an incident is resolved, the platform will use data mining to assess the incident, analyse future risk and issue comprehensive reports on metrics related to the incident, so that it can be used to guide future incident response.

Outside of active incidents, the platform is able to provide relevant entities with a comprehensive oversight of risks and resources within an urban area.

AI analysis can be used to provide risk assessment for specific threats during normal operation, and to train services in simulated scenarios. For the initial deployment, the platform will integrate solutions for the core emergency services in the UAE, and in future will expand with advanced capabilities for additional incident and monitoring capabilities.

Presight, a Big Data analytics company powered by generative AI, has been awarded a contract by NCEMA to develop the platform. It follows the cooperation between the two parties in May during the Crisis and Emergency Management Summit 2023, to enhance UAE’s management of any crisis and emergency situations using big data analytics powered by AI.

‘Need of the hour’

Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cybersecurity of the UAE Government, said: “This AI-driven platform will empower the country’s emergency services with intelligent analysis, and in turn to make the UAE a safer, more secure place to live. Backing this platform is a robust data security infrastructure which is essential to ensure data safety and authenticity.”

Ali Rashid Al Neyadi, Director-General, NCEMA, said: “Such a platform is the need of the hour not just here in the UAE, but across the world. Coordination of emergency services to respond to an incident can be a challenging endeavour, especially when dealing with natural disasters such as the ones witnessed in the region lately, especially when the response involves multiple different service arms. The platform will support the brave first responders by creating a comprehensive, collaborative data platform that can give them and their controllers the right information at the right time resulting in better efficiencies.”