A high school student from Manhattan, New York, designed a artificial intelligence (AI) to help 911 callers get the help they really need – which in turn would reduce response times and eventually save money.aria millions for cities – he said to The Post.
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Pierce Wright – a 17-year-old third-year student at The Browning School in Manhattan – said his model could help dispatchers responding to emergency calls, for example, by predicting when a caller is experiencing a mental health episode. .
“If the algorithm says, 'I think this is a mental health call,' then you can send a psychiatrist or a mental health professional with the EMS team to help the patient and provide the most appropriate care” – instead of simply send police to the scene, Wright said in an interview.
To design the algorithm, Wright combined his experience as an EMS worker with his data science prowess.
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He spent the last year meticulously coding the AI and then training it with nearly two decades worth of statistics gleaned from New York City's massive online database of some 24 million emergency calls.
His work paid off, he says, because his model can predict what resources are needed based solely on factors like the ZIP code of the incoming call, time of day, police station, and initial severity level.
The remarkable project – which took around 200 hours to complete – has already earned the studious teenager numerous accolades, including a first-place award at the TerraNYC STEM Fair at the School of Engineering.aria Tandon from New York University and a second-place trophy at the Science and Engineering Fairaria of New York State, Queens.
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