Near future
Contact us
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Health
  • Environment
  • Architecture
  • energia
  • Transportation
  • Spazio
  • AI
  • concepts
  • Gadgets
  • Italy Next
  • H+
July 6 2022

Coronavirus / Russia-Ukraine

Near future

News to understand, anticipate, improve the future.

No Result
View All Result

News to understand, anticipate, improve the future.

Read in:  Chinese (Simplified)EnglishFrenchGermanItalianJapanesePortugueseRussianSpanish

An AI in China can prevent suicide, indeed everyone

A university professor develops an AI that helps prevent suicide. Here is how its introduction proceeds between cultural successes and pitfalls.

Gianluca Ricciodi Gianluca Riccio
in Technology
Share20Pin3Tweet8SendShare2ShareShare2
An AI in China can prevent suicide, indeed everyone
November 13, 2019
⚪ Reads in 4 minutes
A A

Li Fan, a XNUMX-year-old student, attempted suicide after posting a short message on the Chinese platform similar to Twitter Weibo immediately after Valentine's Day.

“I can't go on anymore. I'm about to give up ", he wrote. It is in these moments that the race against time of those who want to prevent suicide starts. Shortly thereafter, Li Fan lost consciousness.

He was in debt, had just lost his mother and was suffering from severe depression.

About 8.000 km (5.000 miles) from his university in Nanjing, his post was taken over by a program running on a computer in Amsterdam. The program trusted the message and sent a report to volunteers from different parts of China to get them into action.

In the event of a failure in direct contact, the volunteers report their concerns to the local police: and so in the end the Tree Hole Rescue team managed to prevent suicide. And it's just one of many cases.

Maybe you are also interested

The Chinese orbiter Tianwen-1 has mapped the entire surface of Mars

Is China's Lithium the Next Russian Gas? Worse.

No, the Chinese FAST telescope did not discover aliens. Perhaps.

Winds of war, China launches the Zhu Hai Yun, the world's first "bearer"

The founder of the initiative is Huang Zhisheng, senior artificial intelligence researcher in China at the Free University of Amsterdam.

Prevent suicide
Huang Zhisheng, the creator of Tree Hole Rescue

Over the past 18 months, its program has been used by 600 volunteers across China, who in turn claim to have saved nearly 700 people.

"If you hesitate for a second, many lives will be lost", said Huang. "Every week we can prevent suicide many times, and save about 10 people."

The first rescue operation is dated April 29, 2018. A 22-year-old university student, Tao Yue, in Shandong province in northern China, expressed her intention to take her own life two days later on social media.

Peng Ling, a volunteer from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and many others reacted. "I tried to text her before bed and told her I could come and get her"he said.

“She added me as a friend on WeChat (one of the most popular Chinese social networks) and gradually calmed down. Since then, I have kept checking her to see if she was eating. We also buy her a bouquet of flowers on the Internet once a week. "

After this success, the team rescued a man who had attempted to jump off a bridge and a woman who had attempted to kill himself after sexual abuse.

How does the system work?

The program monitors several conversations on Chinese social networks and analyzes the related messages.

Image caption Huang Zhisheng
Huang Zhisheng's software proactively searches for Weibo for certain keywords

THEartificial intelligence automatically classifies posts it finds from 1 to 10.

If the result is less than 6 (which means that only negative words have been detected) the volunteers usually do not intervene.

A 9 means indicates a strong belief that a suicide attempt will be made shortly. A 10 means it is likely to already be underway.

In these cases, the volunteers try to call the police directly and / or contact the relatives and friends of the person involved.

The obstacles

The main impediment to the complete success of the initiative is purely cultural: the older members of Chinese society underestimate depression and are unable to recognize or manage it.

In one case, the AI ​​found a post by a young woman saying: "I'll kill myself when the new year comes." When the volunteers contacted her mother, she laughed and added: "My daughter has never been so happy: how dare you say she is planning to commit suicide?".

Only after an attempt thwarted in extremis by the police did the mother change her mind.

It will be a long journey

Despite the successes, Huang recognizes the limits of his project.

"Since Weibo limits the use of web crawlers, we can only collect around 3.000 conversations per day to prevent a suicide"he said.

"So we can only isolate one or two cases a day, and we choose to focus on the most urgent ones."

A heavy commitment

Another problem is that some of the relief efforts require long-term commitment.

"Most of my life is now occupied with trying to prevent one suicide a day, sometimes more"Li said. "And it's very tiring".

He is currently in contact with 8 rescued people, and has been conversing with them for months, always keeping an eye on them. A vast social aid network should be structured.

I cannot blame him: it is a typical case of how “emotional” human activities can be enhanced by artificial intelligence, and certainly not supplanted.

tags: AIdinnersuicide
Previous post

Nightingale project: why did Google collect millions of medical data?

Next Post

Project L, the yacht of the future: a 120-meter sword that cuts through the sea

COLLABORATE

To submit articles, disclose the results of a research or scientific discoveries write to the editorial staff

    archive

    Have a look here:

    Cyanobacteria
    Spazio

    Humans could breathe in space with brilliant intuition

    Cyanobacteria could help humans breathe in space by transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen.

    Read More
    Twist: Sony presents a concept car, the Vision-S

    Twist: Sony presents a concept car, the Vision-S

    An Italian team is inspired by weeds to create a biodegradable velcro

    An Italian team is inspired by weeds to create a biodegradable velcro

    Double hand transplant performed in the UK: the first of its kind in the world

    Double hand transplant performed in the UK: the first of its kind in the world

    Japan wants to eliminate cash, but it is open war

    Japan wants to eliminate cash, but it is open war

    The daily tomorrow

    Futuroprossimo.it provides news on the future of technology, science and innovation: if there is something that is about to arrive, here it has already arrived. FuturoProssimo is part of the network ForwardTo, studies and skills for future scenarios.

    Subscribe to our newsletter

    Environment
    Architecture
    Artificial intelligence
    Gadgets
    concepts
    Design

    Staff
    Archives
    Advertising
    Privacy Policy

    Medicine
    Spazio
    Robotica
    Work
    Transportation
    energia

    To contact the FuturoProssimo editorial team, write to [email protected]

    Chinese Version
    Édition Française
    Deutsche Ausgabe
    Japanese version
    English Edition
    Edição Portuguesa
    Русское издание
    Spanish edition

    This work is distributed under license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
    © 2021 Futuroprossimo

    No Result
    View All Result
    • Home
    • Tech
    • Health
    • Environment
    • Architecture
    • energia
    • Transportation
    • Spazio
    • AI
    • concepts
    • Gadgets
    • Italy Next
    • H+