STEM Fast Track Fellowship Program

Bridging the Technology Workforce Gap by building Tomorrows Technology Disaster Response Leaders

The acceleration of technology plays an increasing role in today’s disaster response environment and elevates demand for a labor force trained and fluent in STEM skills such as machine learning and crisis informatics.  Academic institutions are providing basic training in concepts, but there is an absence of hands-on and fellowship opportunities that provide experience. The bottom line is that our inability to meet the public’s need in the early hours of a disaster and mitigate impacts is resulting in an increased loss of life, increased recovery times and delaying economic recovery. In addition, many technology companies who excel in the areas of science, technology, and informatics have a willingness to contribute to the solution but often have no easy way to step into the process. Disaster Philanthropy recently reported that for every dollar we spend on mitigation we save six dollars in disaster response.

Humanity Road has a proven track record in leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to improve the human condition during a disaster. In the 2017 hurricane season alone our work saved over 5,000 lives in Texas.  We are training the technology workforce leaders for tomorrow.

Our Fast Track Fellowship Program prepares current and future work forces for the transformation of work that lies ahead.  Participants in the Fast Track Fellowship Program gain valuable training on how artificial intelligence and machine learning is developed and applied in real-world disaster response and gain experience in leveraging these skills for the betterment of Humanity during actual disasters. This Fast Track experience in parallel to official disaster response efforts is a proven method that will rapidly position them for success in their STEM careers.

Humanity Road Interns and apprentices gain hands-on experience with developing analytic skills to recognize patterns in big data, study social media analytics in real time, and gain valuable knowledge about natural language usage in social media. This enriches skills and workforce experience for a broader pool of technology jobs. We wish to scale our program in partnership with the big technology companies matching students with technology mentors and technology products in one-year Fellowship cycles to improve disaster response.  

We would like the MIT Solve team to help us identify the right technology companies for the partnership in this program. We will be matching technology mentors with students to assist those students in gaining the skills and real-world experience to upskill our workforce in the emergency management and disaster response technology workforce labor pool.  

Humanity Road brings eight years' proven experience in training future leaders using a volunteer-freelance work-at-home training experience.  We leverage pattern recognition and artificial intelligence ontology development as well as providing the venue to apply skills and technology projects. The Fellow applicants will contribute their time, skills and project plans, and the technology partners will bring expertise, funding, technology, and advisers.

Our aim is to transform disaster response at the local level to save more lives faster and mitigate the impacts of a catastrophic disaster on local economies.

The STEM Fast Track Fellowship Program trains the workforce leaders for tomorrow by leveraging new technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to improve the human condition during disaster. Individuals seeking experience and training in the use of technology have furthered their career or obtained graduate degrees by volunteering with Humanity Road. The Fast Track Fellowship Program expands on this work by partnering these candidates with  volunteers from our technology companies to gain experience and exposure on emerging technology being developed 

Participants in the program gain valuable training on how artificial intelligence and machine learning is developed and applied in real-world disaster response and gain experience in leveraging these skills for the betterment of Humanity during actual disasters. We train volunteers on the use of social media, natural language, pattern recognition, data analytics, and filtering big data to identify urgent unmet needs during sudden onset disaster. This work supports disaster response by improving the common operating picture for both strategic and tactical response.  Our volunteers test new tools that can improve the disaster response chain of care. 

Our goal is to increase our reach with our current internship program to include a greater number of mentors from partners.   Technology changes are accelerating and the learning curve is steep.   We are interested in opening our internship training program to current workforce candidates from emergency management professions, academia and other relevant workforce members interested in gaining real-time experience and upskilling, reskilling and improving their current disaster response techniques. 

In the next three to five years artificial intelligence and machine based decision processing will increase dramatically.  We will be measuring the impact of our program on emergency response.  Our interest is to contribute to better knowledge management in emergency response world through projects, engagement and experience gained by the participants.  In our first eight years, our internship program consisted of 3 to 4 interns each year.  In our next three to five years we would like to see that doubled or tripled.  Here are some results from previous interns:

We will conduct outreach through emergency management events, social media broadcasts, engagement with academia and technology partners.  We will recruit through our online volunteer portal and other volunteer match open source events.   The candidates will be onboarded to a one year program where they will have the opportunity to roll out their project plan or develop their area and field of engagement.  

Our intern program has been supporting 2-4 students per year. However, our volunteer program has engaged up to 100 volunteers active at any given time. We respond to an average of 50 disasters per year with up to three being catastrophic incidents. Annually Humanity Road supports approximately 50,000 people impacted by disaster.  

About our Domestic and International Collaboration

• FEMA Tech Sector https://www.fema.gov/tech-sector    
• National Library of Medicine  SEA Region
• Member National Business Emergency Operations Center https://www.fema.gov/nbeoc
• DHS Social Media Working Group https://www.dhs.gov/
• Virginia VOAD http://vavoad.communityos.org/cms/
• Yachtaid Global  http://yachtaidglobal.org
• HealthCare Ready https://www.healthcareready.org/
• ITDRC https://itdrc.org

We expect to see a growth in disasters in the next 3 to 5 years.  We are hoping to double or triple our internship and fellowship program.  We estimate our target population annually to grow by at least 40% annually reaching 60,000 in the next twelve months to over 100,000 in the next 3 years.  While we are seeing an increase in the number of people coming into social media to call for help, we would like to work on reducing those calls for help through identifying early indications via natural language processing and artificial intelligence.

Humanity Road has activated for more than 1,000 events over 8 years resulting in rescue of thousands of people and the provision of aid for tens of thousands impacted by disaster. With successful operational experience collaborating during disaster with civilian, military, for profit and nonprofit organizations.

1. Experienced Leadership with financial acumen
2. Volunteer Development 
3. Cross-Functional team building
4. Social Media for Emergency Management (SMEM)
5. Go To Market Processes and Strategy
6. Program Management
7. Pattern Recognition and artificial intelligence
8. Information management and knowledge management
9. Civ-Mil communications in disaster response
10. Ability to provide exposure to large collaborative environment of technology, private and public sector businesses and employers.

Revenue streams include three sources. First, we receive donations from the public and from private industry to support our disaster response activities. This includes receiving matching dollars support from those participating companies whose employees volunteer with Humanity Road or donate to Humanity Road. Secondly, we receive revenue from fee-based mission related services such as providing training to emergency management officials and developing and providing input to materials for disaster preparedness exercises. Our third source of revenue is through grants. Humanity Road is an approved government contractor providing subject matter expertise on the use of social media for disaster response. We provide business requirements input, application testing, user interface testing and ontology development and pattern recognition training sets that improve artificial intelligence to improve the disaster response chain of care. This robust and diverse revenue stream has positioned Humanity Road for ongoing sustainability over the past eight years. Our Financial Reports are available online.

We're poised for growth and we are focused on improving the available resources for a labor force trained and fluent in STEM skills such as machine learning and crisis informatics.  We are experts in social media emergency management and response and we recognize Solve's expertise in creating successful partnerships.  We believe that Solve can help us identify the best partnership opportunities for our fellowship program to flourish and match us with technology organizations interested in supporting fellowship opportunities.

We wish to scale our program in partnership with the big technology companies matching students with technology mentors and technology products in one-year Fellowship cycles to improve disaster response.  Our first year in building this on a grander scale will require careful planning for the right mentors, partnership and funding opportunities to ensure it is a success.  Primarily, we feel Solve's connections in the technology industry will help ensure that we plan strategically and improve our success with the right type of mentor-ship opportunities for our interns.