Using artificial intelligence to help mitigate suicide risk

According to the CDC, the suicide rate for individuals 10-24 years old has increased 56% between 2007 and 2017. In comparison to the general population, more than half of people experiencing homelessness have had thoughts of suicide or have attempted suicide, the National Health Care for the Homeless Council reported. Phebe Vayanos, assistant professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering has been enlisting the help of a powerful ally -artificial intelligence- to help mitigate the risk of suicide. In this research, we wanted to find ways to mitigate suicidal ideation and death among youth. Our idea was to leverage real-life social network information to build a support network of strategically positioned individuals that can'watch-out' for their friends and refer them to help as needed." Vayanos, an associate director at USC's Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS), and her team have been working over the last couple of years to design an algorithm capable of identifying who in a given real-life social group would be the best persons to be trained as "gatekeepers" capable of identifying warning signs of suicide and how to respond. Vayanos and Ph.D. candidate Aida Rahmattalabi, the lead author of the study "Exploring Algorithmic Fairness in Robust Graph Covering Problems," investigated the potential of social connections such as friends, relatives, and acquaintances to help mitigate the risk of suicide. Their paper will be presented at the Thirty-third Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) this week. "We want to ensure that a maximum number of people are being watched out for, taking into account resource limitations and uncertainties of open world deployment.