With ESN being the major theme on day two, day one of the BAPCO 2025 conference focussed in large part on the use of artificial intelligence by emergency services.
The day kicked off with a compelling and unusual session from AI thought leader LJ Rich, who used human beings’ relationship with music as a metaphor for the way in which artificial intelligence processes data. The session was titled ‘AI and the importance of good data (and lots of it)’.
Having used written musical scores and variations in performance to illustrate the importance of “interpretation” when it comes to data, Rich transposed the argument to the emergency services context with a discussion of the ambulance service.
Talking about the importance of “context” in relation to emergency response, Rich said: “This is super relevant to public safety because there’s no reason to know everything at once. The right data at the right time could make a huge difference.
“Serving somebody exactly what they need on the frontline is going to give them much more help than just throwing a bunch of data that lots of other people have done, at the same time. Better data makes things more computable.”
Rich continued: “I’m going to come out of the music world for a second and talk about the scenario of routing ambulances in a medium sized city. Do we look at the layout and the traffic? Do we look at who has the greatest need based on demographics?
“Is there a part of the community that we’re not serving? Can we say people are more likely to survive based on previous data or family history? Scenarios flip based on every piece of data we gather, and what we’re looking at here is balancing safety with innovation.”
The next keynote was delivered by 911 futurist Brad Flanagan, who moved the artificial intelligence discussion more explicitly into the public safety context. His presentation was called ‘Embracing the future: how AI and tech in general is becoming ever-more part of everyday life’.
Discussing potential use cases by the emergency services, he listed a variety of current AI-based solutions including tasking software, as well as something called Otter AI.
Talking about the latter, he said: “What it can do is not only record your meetings but also give a summary telling you what the meeting was about. Then, it will go into a specific outline of everything that happened in the meeting.
“My favourite part is that it has a chatbot, which I can ask [for example] what’s the hardest project that we talked about during this meeting? And it will go through the entire meeting’s transcript and answer the question for me, so I can save the time of having to write the task list and figure out who said what.”
These, he said, were applications that he personally used in his everyday life, right now. “There’s some great opportunities to start finding real-world applications on things that we already have in our pockets” he continued.
“If you want to generate images to motivate, or you just want to practice tactics, that’s possible with what’s happening today.”
BAPCO 2025 is taking place this week at the Coventry Building Society Arena.
