Local governments consider using AI to rate seriousness of bullying cases

Nearly 30 local governments are planning to or are interested in introducing an artificial intelligence system designed to assess the seriousness of school bullying cases in hopes of better responding to them, a source close to the matter said Thursday. Otsu Municipal Government, which came under fire for the way it handled a high-profile bullying case in 2011, has teamed up with information technology services provider Hitachi Systems Ltd., to develop the AI system, which predicts how a case of bullying has the potential to become serious based on an analysis of past cases. School bullying has long been a concern in Japan, with education ministry data showing that elementary, junior and high schools as well as special-needs schools nationwide reported 612,496 cases in the year through March, up 68,563 from a year earlier. When a new case of bullying is reported, information on the incident, such as time, place and perpetrator, is fed into the system, which then searches its database to come up with an estimate of how serious the case is, expressed as a percentage. In all, about 50 pieces of data are used for analysis.