The Burning Question - How Do Humans Make Decisions?

Wednesday, March 27, 2024
04:00 PM - 04:45 PM
All Levels

If we believe that AI can improve decision-making in emergency response, shouldn’t we first understand how humans make decisions to begin with?

Since the time that the use of data in emergency response scenarios has become mainstream, it has been advertised as the tool to improve decision-making. It didn’t take long to realize that the growth of information available was causing problems by itself. Now AI is looked at as a solution to this information overflow problem.

The data is there to support emergency responders to gain situational awareness in turn to make better decisions, but what is situational awareness, how is it developed in the human brain, and what are the barriers to gaining good situational awareness? The neurological process of perceiving, understanding, and predicting what will happen in any given situation is what develops situational awareness. This process is supported by the mental models gained during training which help in gaining situational awareness.

There is a huge gap between the technological aspects of using AI, and the human factors that come into play when emergency responders need to operate in high-risk, high-consequence time-compressed environments.

This presentation will cover the challenges that lie ahead when we truly want to support emergency responders with AI to improve decision-making. Along the way, we will talk about a couple of elephants in the room.

Bart van Leeuwen

Founder, Netage B.V. / Fire Captain, Brandweer Amsterdam

Bart van Leeuwen combines a unique set of experience in the fire service, IT industry and academia, which allows him to provide fresh perspectives on issues involving data usage and human factors. As an “outside the box” thinker, he helps fire departments to approach their information problems differently. In this process, technology is not the answer, it's an enabler and should be treated as such.

He has served for more than 25 years in the Dutch fire service in various positions in both career and part-time fire departments. He currently serves as a Fire Captain in the Amsterdam-Anstelland fire department. Previously, he served as an instructor and has been involved in various innovative projects at various departments.

At Netage B.V. he leads a team of data specialists constantly looking for smarter ways of dealing with available data for the fire service. He has served on various data standard bodies, helping shape important standards and recommendations both in the fire industry and beyond.

He is a group associate at the User-Centric Data Science group at VU University in Amsterdam, where is a regular lecturer on the subject of data in the fire service. Furthermore, he guides both bachelor and master students during their thesis projects.

He is a Situational Awareness Matters! Certified Master Instructor and delivers programs to emergency responders and other people who work in high-risk high high-consequence environments.

He delivered various keynote addresses at both technology and fire-related conferences around the world, and he is a frequent speaker on Smart data for Smarter Firefighting.