Approximately 1,400 miles of pipes, 6,600 storm structures, and hundreds of miles of manmade channels. This is the extensive Fairfax County stormwater system that Chase Suddith, a Virginia Tech alumnus and an emergency management specialist for the county, oversees as part of his job.
He’s responsible for managing snow, floods, and related weather events for a county of approximately 1.2 million people.
Could artificial intelligence (AI) make Suddith’s job easier? Right now, like many people, Suddith uses AI tools to help craft emails and create meeting agendas.
“It’s good at creating checklists and main summaries,” said Suddith, who earned a master’s degree in public administration from Virginia Tech in 2018. “It’s good at communicating and distilling information down.”
But when it comes to using AI in other work, some emergency managers like Suddith are cautious.
Suddith is one of 30 emergency managers in the greater Washington, D.C., metro area who is helping to inform a Virginia Tech research team’s ongoing analysis to determine the ways that AI tools can help crisis and emergency managers do their work better. The team is led by Shalini Misra, associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs and director of the Public-Interest Technology Lab, based at the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington. The lab includes faculty from various disciplines who research the governance, design, and deployment of new, emerging technologies with an eye on human impact.
This project analyzing AI tools is particularly timely. As more industries consider using AI for efficiency, public sector managers face questions — what tasks are appropriate to offload to AI and which ones are best left to human experts?
Misra said her team decided to focus on emergency managers because of the important public roles they play. The research was funded by a Destination Areas 2.0 award from Virginia Tech with the goal of designing, implementing, and evaluating AI tools that serve the public interest along with the managers who use them.
