The School Closure Awareness System

Section 1: Use Case Identifiers

Use Case ID: HHS-CDC-00024
Agency: HHS
Op Div/Staff Div: CDC
Use Case Topic Area: Emergency Management
Is the AI use case found in the below list of general commercial AI products and services?
None of the above.
What is the intended purpose and expected benefits of the AI?
Identifying unplanned school closures. CDC is responsible for supporting schools before, during, and after and emergency. During COVID 19 this included monitoring school closure or virtual status and reporting this to federal partners, the White House, and the public. Due to cost the process used during COVID was no longer feasible and ceased in DEC 2022. We explored multiple ways to capture this data and our current system met the need best.

This AI has allowed us to save nearly 2-million-dollars from contracting fees and decrease human work hours by 200 hours. It has made the capture of some of this data possible after cessation of the process used during COVID 19 which we could no longer support. The AI supported system is faster and captures more information about individual closures than the original human-powered process.
Describe the AI system's outputs.
This system uses publicly available Facebook posts from approximately 40,000 school or district Facebook accounts. Then uses a large language model to categorize posts as unplanned school closure for several types of events (weather, health, facility issues, safety). It also will denote the type of status change (full closure, virtual, hybrid, or early / late dismissal). The data is checked and recoded (if needed) by a staff person every 24 hours.
Stage of Development: Implementation and Assessment
Is the AI use case rights-impacting, safety-impacting, both, or neither?
Neither

Section 2: Use Case Summary

Date Initiated: 07/2022
Date when Acquisition and/or Development began: 11/2022
Date Implemented: N/A
Date Retired: N/A
Was the AI system involved in this use case developed (or is it to be developed) under contract(s) or in-house?
Developed in-house.
Provide the Procurement Instrument Identifier(s) (PIID) of the contract(s) used.
N/A
Is this AI use case supporting a High-Impact Service Provider (HISP) public-facing service?
N/A
Does this AI use case disseminate information to the public?
No
How is the agency ensuring compliance with Information Quality Act guidelines, if applicable?
N/A
Does this AI use case involve personally identifiable information (PII) that is maintained by the agency?
No
Has the Senior Agency Official for Privacy (SAOP) assessed the privacy risks associated with this AI use case?
ongoing

Section 3: Data and Code

Do you have access to an enterprise data catalog or agency-wide data repository that enables you to identify whether or not the necessary datasets exist and are ready to develop your use case?
No
Describe any agency-owned data used to train, fine-tune, and/or evaluate performance of the model(s) used in this use case.
None
Is there available documentation for the model training and evaluation data that demonstrates the degree to which it is appropriate to be used in analysis or for making predictions?
Documentation has been partially completed
Which, if any, demographic variables does the AI use case explicitly use as model features?
N/A
Does this project include custom-developed code?
Yes
If the code is open-source, provide the link for the publicly available source code.
N/A

Section 4: AI Enablement and Infrastructure

Does this AI use case have an associated Authority to Operate (ATO) for an AI system?
Yes
System Name: Enterprise Data, Analytics, and Visualization Platform
How long have you waited for the necessary developer tools to implement the AI use case?
More than 12 months
For this AI use case, is the required IT infrastructure provisioned via a centralized intake form or process inside the agency?
Yes
Do you have a process in place to request access to computing resources for model training and development of the AI involved in this use case?
Yes
Has communication regarding the provisioning of your requested resources been timely?
Yes
How are existing data science tools, libraries, data products, and internally-developed AI infrastructure being re-used for the current AI use case?
Use of existing data platforms
Has information regarding the AI use case, including performance metrics and intended use of the model, been made available for review and feedback within the agency?
Documentation has been published