Centre for Social Services Engineering

Using AI to optimize social services: U of T researchers team up with industry and government

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 23:15:31 +0000

Using AI to optimize social services: U of T researchers team up with industry and government

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 02/22/2022 - 18:15

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Researchers from U of T’s Centre for Social Services Engineering are helping to develop a platform that harnesses AI to improve wayfinding for Canadians seeking social services (photo by Luis Baneres via Getty Images)

Geoffrey Vendeville

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Artificial Intelligence

Centre for Social Services Engineering

Cheryl Regehr

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

A married mother of two who lives in Winnipeg, “Shawna” struggles to afford rent, groceries and needs dental care – but she doesn’t have coverage through her part-time office assistant job and she isn’t sure if she is eligible for help.

At the moment, the next step for “Shawna,” a fictitious persona created by researchers, would involve contacting a social service and being assigned a case manager, or calling a helpline.

But that could soon be about to change.

In a project led by HelpSeeker Technologies in collaboration with Corsac Technologies and Microsoft, researchers from the �ؿ�ζSM’s Centre for Social Services Engineering (CSSE) are developing a platform that harnesses artificial intelligence to improve wayfinding for Canadians seeking social services. The platform also aims to optimize service delivery, improve decision making across the system and provide data that will help policy-makers fine-tune social programs.

The project – called Compass – is supported by Canada’s Digital Supercluster, a federal program to develop and accelerate digital technologies.

Mark Fox (photo by Lynsey Mellon)

Mark Fox, founding director of the centre and a professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, said U of T researchers Bart Gajderowicz. Daniela Rosu and Lester Lyu are creating an “ontology” of client needs and social services, a machine learning algorithm to populate a database of available social services and their eligibility requirements, as well as an intelligent system for matching client needs to social service outcomes.

“In order to do Compass successfully, we need to have a very rich representation of clients and of the service providers, and how the two interact with each other,” Fox said.

“That’s what we are providing. We’re providing an ontology – a standard – for representing client and social service information.”

The ontology is based on the “common impact data standard,” a system for organizing impact data developed by the centre and researchers at Carleton University, social investment measurement firm Sametrica and the Centre for Social Innovation.

Compass will consist of three hubs: one that matches clients with services, another for case managers and a third for policy-makers who seek to improve the system. “We started last year. The first deliverables are going to be [due] by the end of this year,” Fox said.

Compass has received $4.9 million in total funding, $3.4 million from industry and the rest from Canada’s Digital Supercluster, a federal program announced in 2018 to develop and accelerate digital technologies.

Cheryl Regehr, U of T’s vice-president and provost and a professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, said the Compass project is an excellent example of how university researchers can collaborate with the social service sector, industry and government partners to find solutions to complicated issues.

“My own area of research is social work,” said Regehr. “As a result, I am all too aware of how the challenges of social services delivery can have deleterious effects on our communities.”

Regehr added that the project will play a key role in improving Canada’s social safety net at a time when many people are counting on it to deliver.

“At a time when the pandemic has highlighted more than ever the cracks in our health and social services systems – and the people that fall into them – this project is critical and has the potential to improve and save lives,” Regehr said.

“Moreover, this real-world application of Dr. Fox’s research will make important contributions to understandings of complex systems-change across the social and natural sciences – contributions that will lead to better societal outcomes.”

François-Philippe Champagne, minister of innovation, science and industry, said in a statement that the project exemplifies Canada’s commitment to advancing social innovation through transformational digital technologies.

“Supporting the needs of our most vulnerable populations is critical to improving the health, wellbeing and safety of all Canadians,” he said.

The project is being developed and validated through partnerships with the City of Lethbridge, Medicine Hat Community Housing Society and Homeward Trust in Edmonton, as well as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Sue Paish, CEO of the Digital Technology Supercluster, said in a statement that the Compass project shows how digital innovation technology can be used to serve the greater social good while transforming any sector in Canada.

“Canadian-made technologies like this show the world that Canada is poised to own the podium in digital innovation,” she said.

Engineering efficiencies to help the neediest

sgupta — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:08:55 +0000

Engineering efficiencies to help the neediest sgupta Mon, 10/19/2015 - 07:08

Tyler Irving

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Tyler Irving

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U of T's Mark Fox founds the Centre for Social Services Engineering

Two years ago, Professor of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Mark Fox spent 36 hours living on the street. It was for a charity fundraiser – and also to get a better sense of how the homeless live and how social services are delivered.

“It led me to ask the question: What are we doing as engineers to address the needs of people less fortunate than ourselves?” he says.

As a result of his experience, Fox co-founded the Centre for Social Services Engineering (CSSE) at U of T. Now more than a year old, the centre applies industrial and systems engineering techniques – including mathematical analysis, big data and machine learning – to improve the delivery of goods and services to vulnerable populations in urban centres.

Fox, who was named U of T Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering earlier this year, has spent decades studying how to make organizations more efficient. In his field, industrial engineering, innovations like supply-chain management and just-in-time delivery are routinely used to help companies lower costs and improve performance.

The same techniques can be just as easily applied to other sectors. In the last 30 years, banks, hospitals and other organizations have increasingly hired industrial engineers to redesign their operations.

According to Fox (pictured at right during his time on the street) there’s no reason why social services shouldn’t benefit as well.

How exactly does an engineer help meet social needs? Fox puts the case of a recent immigrant soon to give birth who has very little money and no social network to rely on. Meanwhile, a grandmother living in an affluent neighbourhood has crib, acquired for her grandchildren for but no longer needed.

“The crib has been sitting in the basement for the last three years, and she doesn’t even remember it’s there,” says Fox. "The grandmother doesn’t know there is a need in her community. Furthermore, because she’s forgotten it, she hasn’t even thought to post it on an online classified site or donate it."

Fox’s idea is to use the same tools that marketers use to build profiles of their target audiences – analyzing purchases from credit card data or looking at household surveys – to build up a picture of what resources are available and where. The goal, he says, is “to be able to learn what the supply side has, and then figure out a way in which we can reach out. Such a system would identify people who have goods and services that people need but are unaware of.”

In Ontario alone, Fox notes, there are 45,000 charities or non-governmental organizations that provide a wealth of services. ”Some may be furniture banks, some may provide transportation, some may just provide money,” he says. He envisions a kind of virtual NGO that would integrate all of these services and make them available through a single portal.

Fox also hopes to integrate the social needs marketplace into existing programs such as 211 Toronto, a hotline that helps Torontonians find social services.

Another Centre for Social Services Engineering project focuses on the representation and analysis of city indicators. It builds on the recently developed the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 37120 standard of 100 indicators to measure city performance, led by Professor Patricia McCarney at U of T’s Global Cities Institute.

The CSSE’s PolisGnosis project, named after the Greek words for “city” and “knowledge,” seeks to create a consistent and meaningful way of representing these indicators on the Semantic Web, an online network promoting common data formats, and automate the diagnosis of a city’s performance.

One such ISO indicator concerns the ratio of students to teachers in public schools. Many cities don’t yet provide the data from which their indicator was derived, and those that do could be using data inconsistent with the indicator’s definition. They might count school board administrators as teachers, or distinguish primary and secondary schools differently.

By enabling consistent analysis of such metrics, the PolisGnosis project aims to help lower-performing cities to make improvements by diagnosing the root cause of their underperformance.

Fox believes there are many ways in which engineering analysis can help make life better for those in need. While the CSSE is not the first attempt to use organizational management techniques to address these problems, Fox says it is the first time the practice has been raised to such a level within an engineering faculty.

“It's not a question of why is it opportune now,” he says. “It could have been done 30 years ago. It's really a question of why did it take so long.”

Learn more about the Centre for Social Services Engineering.

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