PHO Rounds: AI Technologies in Public Health Part 2: Lessons Learned from Developing the AONES Tool

The Automated Opioid News Event-based Surveillance system (AONES) is a tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify opioid-related news articles and extract information about the unregulated drug supply from them. It was funded by a one-year Public Health Ontario Locally Driven Collaborative Project grant and developed by a public health unit (PHU) in collaboration with other PHUs and academic partners.
This PHO Rounds explores the lessons learned during its development. The presentation covers the background work of setting up the technical and organizational infrastructure, and considerations for pipeline development and data storage. It focuses on the importance of understanding the data and iterating quickly during development. Finally, it discusses the critical components of data visualization and knowledge exchange, and production. The insights shared during this presentation can support teams in public health settings in their own applied AI projects.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
• Describe the process of developing an AI tool for production.
• Identify common technical and human resource requirements for developing AI tools.
• Explain the iterative data exploration and annotation cycle.
• Plan for the knowledge exchange and technical production components to ensure tool use and sustainability.
Presenters: Allison Maier and Alex Hamilton
The presentation can be found here: www.publicheal...