On Friday, 12 June 2026, SAPEA is organising “AI for Crises and Emergencies: Understanding and Communicating Disasters” with the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. This event intends to unpack how AI is used to understand the situation, share information, and communicate it effectively.

AI is an ‘umbrella term’ that includes a diverse set of technologies, methodologies and applications, including machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing.  It has become the centre of a lively debate in recent years. For crises, AI’s potential to improve the prediction of hazards or rapidly analyse the consequences of a disaster has been highlighted as much as the difficulties of AI's slop, biases, or inadequate representation of vulnerable population. In the recent SAPEA evidence review report “Artificial Intelligence in Crisis and Emergency Management” and in the statement of the Chief Advisors, the opportunities and risks associated to AI in crises are explored.

Examples for the questions we intend to discuss are:

• Dis- and misinformation: the use of AI in the proliferation and creation of misinformation (especially images), but also its potential to help detect and debunk mis- and disinformation.
• The increasing use of LLM (Large Language Models) to explain complex crises and make insights rapidly accessible. Yet, there are issues of hallucinations and wrong information that sound very credible, along with well-known AI biases to confirm, rather than confront the user, potentially creating new AI echo chambers.
• The use of chatbots and agentic AI as the next step to personalise responses to the caller or user and deal with a potential surge of questions during the response to a crisis.

Drawing on the recent work for the European Scientific Advice Mechanism, our distinguished panel of speakers will discuss these issues, drawing on their academic and professional expertise and experience.

A long-standing member of ALLEA, part of the SAPEA consortium, the Accademia will host this event as part of its rich calendar of seminars, lectures, and conferences devoted to many themes, among which figures artificial intelligence. Torino is also home to an important technical University and to a rich ecosystem in digital research and enterprises.

Programme

• 9:45 – 9:55: Arriving, welcome by the Host, introduction by the Moderator
• 9:55 – 10:15: Prof. Tina Comes: “Ai&Crisis Management: Unterstanding and Communicating Disasters - the SAPEA Report”
• 10:15– 10:35: Prof. Remy Slama: “Framing the risks and opportunities of AI use in crisis Management (Statement by the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors)”
• 10:35-11:00: Prof. Piero Boccardo: “From Earth observation to action: AI, space data, and foundation models for next-generation emergency management”
• 11:00-11:15 Coffee break
• 11:15 – 11:35: Dr. Thomas Kox: “AI-based warning systems. AI as decision-maker or as decision-support”
• 11:35 – 12:00: Prof. Emilija Stojmenova: "The First Casualty of Crisis Is Truth. AI Just Made It Worse"
• 12:00 – 12:45: Panel discussion and Q&A
• 12:45: Final words by the Moderator, light lunch at 13:00