Ottawa turns to AI to predict suicide through social media searches

The Canadian government will soon hire an Ottawa-based company specializing in social media monitoring and artificial intelligence to forecast spikes in suicide rates. A contract with Advanced Symbolics Inc., an AI and market research firm, is set to be finalized next month. Working with the company to develop its strategy, the federal government will define "suicide-related behaviour" on social media and "use that classifier to conduct market research on the general population of Canada," according to a document published to Public Works website. This pilot project will last three months, after which the government "will determine if future work would be useful for ongoing suicide surveillance," the tender document said. Instead of calling people to assess public opinion, Advanced Symbolics conducts its market research by identifying and tracking social media accounts to build a representative sample of a population.