AI Helps Identify People at Risk for Suicide

The post caught the attention of Facebook's AI system, which is programmed to spot potential suicidal language. The system decided it was an emergency and passed it along to moderators for review, who then alerted authorities in Buenos Aires. Before long, first responders were on the scene. "Artificial intelligence can be a very powerful tool," says Enrique del Carril, the investigations director in the district attorney's office in Buenos Aires. "We saved a woman far away in remote Argentina before something terrible happened. Facebook's suicide-alert system is just one of many efforts to use artificial intelligence to help identify people at risk for suicide as early as possible. In these programs, researchers use computers to comb through massive amounts of data, such as electronic health records, social-media posts, and audio and video recordings of patients, to find common threads among people who attempted suicide. Then algorithms can start to predict which new patients are more ...