CAREER: An Integrated Trustworthy AI Research and Education Framework for Modeling Human Behavior in Climate Disasters

Increase in frequency and severity of weather and climate disasters has resulted in greater harm to human lives, civil infrastructures, and the economy. An essential step toward building disaster resilience requires deep understanding and robust modeling of human behaviors before, during, and after catastrophic events. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project supports research on trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies to transform behavioral modeling in weather and climate disasters and advances STEM education and emergency management practices. Such theory-informed, high-resolution models are explainable, and bias in them is minimized in support of time- and safety-critical decisions. The project contributes to training of the next-generation scientists and engineers to build and utilize cutting-edge AI tools for disaster management. Research on harnessing AI to enhance human behavioral modeling in disasters is emerging but still in its infancy. Notably, many of the current models function as a black box and have not thoroughly considered critical issues such as trustworthiness, bias, and fairness. This project fills the knowledge gap by developing an integrated trustworthy AI research and education framework. Five main tasks are pursued: 1) Coupling fundamental theories with data-driven AI approaches to improve the prediction of human behaviors in weather and climate disasters; 2) characterizing fairness issues present in AI-based behavioral models, and reducing inherent bias and inequity; 3) interpreting model inputs and outputs to gain unique insights and advance theories; 4) transferring research outcomes into high school and undergraduate engineering curricula; and 5) providing training opportunities to emergency managers and transportation professionals to enhance their technological competency. Collectively, this CAREEER project has the potential to yield significant improvement to emergency management, social equity, and community resilience. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.