HHS · no agency ID · record R0648

NewsScape

Department of Health and Human Services · HHS/CDC

Overview

Development stage: PilotSource: b) Pilot – The use case has been deployed in a limited test or pilot capacity.
High-impact designation: Not high-impactSource: c) Not high-impact
Impact justification: Not reported
Start date: 2023-01 (month precision)Source: Jan-23
Withheld from public reporting: NoSource: a) No

Mission

Topic area: Emergency Management
Operational functions: Summarization Derived by keyword rules; see methodology

Problem the AI is intended to solve

Development of early warning indicators. News articles can form an early warning indicator of public health events and other pieces of information which can be utilized across all major domains of public health. Because of the quantity of news articles, manual efforts are impossible to gather this information.

Expected benefits

There are a variety of endpoints that this AI output could help support. Various teams across the CDC have expressed interest in being able to quickly get the right news content, with summaries of those articles to help support outbreak detection, report generation, surveillance and monitoring of pathogen specific news, etc. AI lets us efficiently filter and summarize thousands of news articles a day into a handful of daily "news events" that user can glean information from.

System outputs

NewsScape is a AI enabled news aggregation and summarization that is hosted within the 1CDP platform. The main motivation to build NewsScape was to develop a system that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to surface relevant insight from recent news articles. NewsScape ingests a high volume of news articles, in the order of thousands of news articles everyday, and surfaces the information from them that related to the topic we were interested (for example, pathogen related news articles, or U.S. medical supply chain updates). The tool can be customized based on specific program office needs, and can be deployed independently of one another so that one program office can have their own custom version of NewsScape installed.

Technology

AI classification: Generative AISource: Generative AI: AI that generates new or synthetic content (e.g., images, videos, audio, text, code).
System name(s): 1 CDC Data Platform (1CDP)
Custom-developed code: No
Public source code: Not reported

Sourcing

How it was built: Contract and in-houseSource: c) Developed with both contracting and in-house resources
Vendor (as reported): Palantir Technologies
Vendors (standardized): Palantir

A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.

Data and privacy

Involves PII: No
Privacy Impact Assessment: Not reported
Authorization to Operate: Yes
Demographic features: k) None of the above
Training and evaluation data: Not reported
Federal Data Catalog: Not reported

Governance

0 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.

Pre-deployment testingNo answer reported

AI impact assessmentNo answer reported

Independent reviewNo answer reported

Ongoing monitoringNo answer reported

Operator trainingNo answer reported

Fail-safeNo answer reported

Appeal processNo answer reported

User and public consultationNo answer reported

Potential impacts and how they were identified

Not reported