Workforce fears concerning the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) are well-documented.
One 2023 survey, for instance, found more than three-quarters (77%) of 2,000 employed Americans saying they were concerned that AI would cause job loss within the next 12 months. Among those employees, 44% said they were “very concerned,” with 33% saying they felt “somewhat concerned” about this prospect.
Meanwhile, AI advocates contend that the technology exists in the workplace to make humans’ lives easier, automating repetitive, non-skilled tasks and freeing workers up to focus on more pressing, strategic undertakings.
A team of Carnegie Mellon University graduate students have developed an AI-based tool designed to help government workers do just that.
The group of grad students from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy have unveiled GovScan, a generative AI tool “that helps researchers find the information they seek in a matter of seconds, not hours,” according to a Carnegie Mellon statement.
Over the course of seven weeks, students Davis Craig, Aakash Dolas, Tyler Faris and Eashwari Samant created the tool with the goal of improving the usability of government reports.
In the aforementioned statement, federal government project lead Maya Mechenbier, detailed a challenge that helped provide Craig and company with a real-life challenge for GovScan to tackle.
The students connected with government workers responsible for reviewing reports for child-care funding from all 50 states, with some of those reports including hundreds of pages. Policy analysts were charged with analyzing and comparing the effectiveness of programs.
“Whether it’s for Medicaid or the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) subsidy dollars, states’ plans are typically stored and made public in a PDF form,” said Mechenbier. “Fifty states might do 50 different things with their programs.”
This reality “can make it hard for a policy analyst to absorb such large quantities of data, determine who might be addressing certain rules in certain ways or understand trends emerging across the country,” according to Carnegie Mellon.
To help make that process easier and more efficient, the students created a working model that sorts through those reports to answer analysts’ questions. For example, an analyst might ask GovScan which states provide child-care funding for low-income, single parent households. The tool scans all the reports in its database and provides a list of results, including source citations.
According to Carnegie Mellon, policy analysts told Craig and company that the GovScan platform cut the time they typically spend looking for specific data points within these reports from three to four hours down to about 30 seconds.
“GovScan is like the ‘Control F’ search function on steroids,” said Craig.
This type of efficiency is one of the tool’s primary benefits, but according to its creators.
“[GovScan] reduces the cognitive load for researchers,” said Dolas. “The saved time and effort free up humans to spend their time and attention on analyzing and understanding the results.”
26 March 2024
Category
HR News Article