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The authors developed BEACON, a multilingual agent system designed to enhance wildfire evacuation guidance for individuals with limited English proficiency, addressing a critical gap in emergency communication. By integrating real-time GPS data, fire perimeter information, and weather updates, BEACON predicts fire danger levels and generates personalized evacuation routes and checklists. The system's dynamic language settings ensure that users receive tailored information in their preferred language, significantly improving accessibility and safety during emergencies.
Over 80% of emergency messages are in English, but BEACON ensures that non-English speakers receive critical evacuation guidance in their native language, potentially saving lives.
Wildfire seasons have become 84 days longer in the current days than in the 1970s, causing enormous threats to one's financial status and short- and long-term health. During the fire, public agencies send out emergency messages to provide warnings and orders. Although 26 million people in the US have limited English proficiency, over 80% of those messages are only delivered in English, which can cause disproportionate information distribution and awareness. In order to better serve marginalized communities during emergencies, the authors developed BEACON, a service that provides comprehensive and personalized evacuation guidance, including navigation routes, personalized checklists, and a chatbot in the language that a user uses. Our current system ingests data including fire perimeter information, evacuation order status, and shelter information from Watch Duty. When a user is within a certain proximity from the fire, the system utilizes real-time GPS locations and nearby weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to predict fire danger levels. The assessment model refreshment are dynamically scheduled based on fire progress and trends using XGBoost. If the location has a likelihood of fire danger, the system sends alerts with evacuation routes outputted from a polygon-avoidant routing pipeline. The application provides a context-aware multilingual agent that users can communicate with and is tightly connected to other features of the application. In addition, based on data that the user entered, the system dynamically generates and checks off personalized reminder items to provide an organized evacuation plan. The system's user interface dynamically changes its language settings based on the language the user most recently used in either setting or chatbot conversation for all the application elements.
