As makeshift tent cities spring up across Canada to house rough sleepers who fear using shelters due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one city is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to predict which residents are at risk of becoming homeless.
Computer programmers working for the city of London, Ontario, 170km southwest of the provincial capital Toronto, said that the new system is the first of its kind anywhere — and it could offer insights for other regions grappling with homelessness.
“Shelters are just packed to the brim across the country right now,” said London’s homeless prevention manager Jonathan Rivard, who works on the AI system.
Illustration: Mountain People
“We need to do a better job of providing resources to individuals before they hit rock bottom, not once they do,” Rivard said.
Canada is seeing a second wave of COVID-19 cases, with the Ontario Government warning that the province could experience the “worst-case scenarios seen in northern Italy and New York City” if trends continue.
Homeless people are at higher risk of being infected and infecting others during the pandemic, due to weakened immune systems, and poor access to shelter and sanitation, health experts say.
The AI system analyzes the personal data of participants to calculate who faces having nowhere to sleep for an extended period, said Matt Ross, an information technology (IT) expert who helped the city build the program.
As a test, the Chronic Homelessness Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) system tracked a group of individuals for six months before its formal launch in August.
Over that period, CHAI saw a 93 percent success rate in predicting when someone would become chronically homeless, Ross said, adding that it is now meeting or exceeding that rate.
By using AI to anticipate who is likely to become chronically homeless, the city can prioritize how it works with those individuals, and try to provide them with safe housing and access to health services they might need, Rivard said.
Chronic homelessness refers to someone who has been staying in a shelter for 180 days or more within a12-month period, Rivard said.
Those individuals use 12 times more resources than people who are occasionally homeless, and addressing their situation can in the long run save time and money, he said.
City staff are working with local shelters, community groups and homeless people on how to best use the data, Rivard added.
Annually, more than 230,000 people in Canada experience homelessness — “about 35,000 on any given night,” advocacy group Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness president Tim Richter said.
Richter blames government cuts to affordable housing and other programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s for what he calls the “explosive growth” of mass homelessness over the past 30 years.
When city officials first suggested using a computer program to predict chronic homelessness, it “raised some red flags” related to privacy, said Peter Rozeluk, executive director of Mission Services of London, a nonprofit that runs homeless shelters.
“I suppose whenever anyone uses the term ‘AI,’ it can seem dystopian, simply because of how the media and Hollywood has depicted artificial intelligence,” Rozeluk said.
After discussing the proposal with officials, he said that he supports its general goal of getting better data to aid in decision making.
The AI program is only applied to consenting individuals, and participants can quit the program at any time, Ross said, adding that their data would be removed from the model.
His team of data scientists do not have access to the real names of individuals involved.
Instead, each person is given an identification number which is run through the system along with other data, including age, race, gender, military status, the kinds of city services they have accessed and how often they sleep in shelters.
Unlike most other AI systems, which produce their final conclusions without revealing the steps taken to get to them, London’s technology can explain how and why it reached assessments about an individual’s risk level, Ross said.
Building the system cost about C$14,000 (US$10,480), funded by the city’s IT department, Ross said, adding that CHAI therefore does not take away resources from front-line services for homeless people, such as shelters.
So far, the system has identified at least 88 people at risk of chronic homelessness, in a city of about 400,000 residents, Rivard said.
According to the model’s predictions, a single man who has stayed in shelters, is older than 52 and has no local family is often at high risk of becoming chronically homeless, especially if he is a veteran or a First Nation member, Rivard said.
While the AI provides information about an individual’s risk of becoming long-term homeless, all decisions related to deploying services are kept in human hands, he added.
Two unaffiliated computer science experts and a privacy lawyer said that the program seems to take the necessary steps to protect users’ personal information.
“It looks like they have put a lot of thought into doing it right,” said Teresa Scassa, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who studies AI and privacy.
The designers have ensured that the data put into the system is standardized and accurate, and meets national guidelines on the ethical use of automated decisionmaking, she said.
Amulya Yadav, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies AI and homelessness, said that the initiative is an example of how machine learning is “being democratized.”
“The barriers to entry are being reduced,” Yadav said. “I really hope they pull it off well, and it’s the first of many.”
However, Scassa, Yadav and other experts worry about what might happen to sensitive data on vulnerable residents.
“It is paramount to think about not just what our data is used for, but what can our data be used for in the future — and assume whoever holds the data has no scruples,” said Paulo Garcia, an assistant professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University.
If a new government came into power looking to cut costs, for example, this information could potentially be used to determine who is taking up large amounts of resources and where funding could be slashed, Scassa said.
Rozeluk, who works on the front lines of Canada’s homelessness crisis, has a different concern.
Predicting when someone might become chronically homeless is less important than providing actual housing, he said.
Studies have been done for decades on the issue, and the consensus is clear, Rozeluk said.
“The solution to homelessness is safe, adequate, affordable housing ... and providing support afterwards,” he said.
Speaking at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on May 13, former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that democracies must remain united and that “Taiwan’s security is essential to regional stability and to defending democratic values amid mounting authoritarianism.” Earlier that day, Tsai had met with a group of Danish parliamentarians led by Danish Parliament Speaker Pia Kjaersgaard, who has visited Taiwan many times, most recently in November last year, when she met with President William Lai (賴清德) at the Presidential Office. Kjaersgaard had told Lai: “I can assure you that ... you can count on us. You can count on our support
Denmark has consistently defended Greenland in light of US President Donald Trump’s interests and has provided unwavering support to Ukraine during its war with Russia. Denmark can be proud of its clear support for peoples’ democratic right to determine their own future. However, this democratic ideal completely falls apart when it comes to Taiwan — and it raises important questions about Denmark’s commitment to supporting democracies. Taiwan lives under daily military threats from China, which seeks to take over Taiwan, by force if necessary — an annexation that only a very small minority in Taiwan supports. Denmark has given China a
Many local news media over the past week have reported on Internet personality Holger Chen’s (陳之漢) first visit to China between Tuesday last week and yesterday, as remarks he made during a live stream have sparked wide discussions and strong criticism across the Taiwan Strait. Chen, better known as Kuan Chang (館長), is a former gang member turned fitness celebrity and businessman. He is known for his live streams, which are full of foul-mouthed and hypermasculine commentary. He had previously spoken out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and criticized Taiwanese who “enjoy the freedom in Taiwan, but want China’s money”
A high-school student surnamed Yang (楊) gained admissions to several prestigious medical schools recently. However, when Yang shared his “learning portfolio” on social media, he was caught exaggerating and even falsifying content, and his admissions were revoked. Now he has to take the “advanced subjects test” scheduled for next month. With his outstanding performance in the general scholastic ability test (GSAT), Yang successfully gained admissions to five prestigious medical schools. However, his university dreams have now been frustrated by the “flaws” in his learning portfolio. This is a wake-up call not only for students, but also teachers. Yang did make a big