Austin company using AI to track homeless encampments in city

AUSTIN, Texas - An Austin company is using artificial intelligence to track homeless camps in the city.

"It gets around the need for human analysts to sift through the data that allows for human error," Nomadik AI owner Morgan Winters said.

AI is currently being used for manufacturing, education, and transportation. The owners of the Austin company said, why not use it for a local issue, like homelessness?

"There’s only two of us, and it would be very hard to do this with two people," Nomadik AI owner Trevor Sorrells said.

With the help of AI, they’re tracking homeless encampments in Austin.

"A lot of these nonprofits in the city and stuff like that don’t have really accurate data to both try to solve the problem and then try to accurately manage how well they’re solving the problem," Sorrells said.

Winters and Sorrells have created the Nomadik app where people like Jamie Hammonds, the owner of DASH, can provide information.

"I will go to each camp, I will photograph it, do a quick little inventory and hit submit," Hammonds said.

Then AI does the rest of the work.

"We're taking in all of the inputs and then using our ML models in the background to parse through all of that," Sorrells said.

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He said it builds a picture of the current state of that homeless encampment and how many people are there.

"There's going to be a more accurate count than what they're actually putting out," Hammonds said.

The Austin Homeless Strategy Office said ECHO estimated in October about 6,600 homeless people in the city. Winters and Sorrells said they hope to help the homeless through the app.

"We want to partner with some nonprofits so that people can actually just request resources or check in so that there's a layer of safety that the app includes where it's like, I'm here, I want you to know I'm here so that people can come and reach out to me, because right now, unless you see it as you're driving around, there's not really a whole lot, there's no window into actually what's going on in these camps," Sorrells said.

"I think it’s going to change the way homelessness is approached in the future," Hammonds said.

The creators said the app is set to be released in March.