FY25 Regents Research Grant Call for Proposals (Opportunity Kick-off)

Research Development Opportunity Kick-off events are introductions to specific funding opportunities or resources that enhance application competitiveness. 

Sponsored by ASU KE Research Development and UA Research Development. 

To-date, DEMA has invested in and collaborated with Arizona universities on gathering the requisite data for improved analytics to support the decisions around disaster response and mitigation. These ongoing efforts are enhancing human analysis of disasters. While this represents a significant step toward more data-driven and efficient decision-making at DEMA, this does not provide for prediction of second- and third- order effects, insights into resource allocation, and course-of-action (COA) planning. These capabilities would benefit greatly from artificial intelligence (AI) technology. However, today’s commercial AI solutions are “black box” systems that lack the explainability, transparency, and robustness suitable for mission critical decision support that requires human understanding of how the system arrived at its predictions and recommendations. Recent advances by researchers at Arizona universities in areas such as neurosymbolic AI, computational logic, and graph-based reasoning hold promise to address such gaps. For example, the recently released PyReason software library can serve as a key building block for such mission critical capabilities. 

We seek an allocation from Arizona Board of Regents to leverage the AI research talent of Arizona universities. The goal of this is to produce a software system prediction and course-of-action analysis specifically creating the following capabilities: 

• The creation of explainable AI models that can identify key interdependencies andtrends in historical emergency response “community lifeline” data housed by DEMA’sDivision of Emergency Management.
• The ability to leverage models described in (1) to provide predictions and analysis of second- and third- order effects along with transparent explanations as to why the system reached such predictions.
• The ability for the system to provide guidance on pre-positioned assets to enable preparedness for emergencies.
• Automated, transparent, and interactive course of action analysis for disaster response and mitigation.
• The ability to analyze and mitigate impacts to the State of Arizona due to the onset of one or more natural or human-caused hazards and support potential development of the software for this use-case

Presenters: 

• Kyle Elliott, Proposal Manager 
• Kim Patten, University of Arizona, Associate Vice President for Research Development

Date: September 3, 2024 
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:00 pm AZ
Location: online only
Webinar: https://researchacademy.asu.edu/events/fy25-regents-research-grant-call-proposals-opportunity-kick