UK's Prince William says AI can help to tackle homelessness

LONDON- Britain's Prince William said artificial intelligence was being harnessed to identify people at risk of homelessness, enabling early intervention to keep them in housing or reduce the time they spend on the streets or in temporary accommodation.

The prince told an audience at London Tech Week that it was an "unusual conversation" for a technology forum, but the types of data companies handled daily could give insights that made a real difference.

"I'm not sure you realize how much that data can be used to predict and see problems with potential homelessness before they arise," he said.

Homelessness has long been an important cause for the prince, and three years ago he set up the "Homewards" project with the aim of making the problem "rare, brief and unrepeated".

The program launched its Homelessness Data Lab at Tech Week in partnership with LandAid and Salesforce, supported by Bloomberg, VodafoneThree, Accenture, NatWest Group and others.

The lab will analyze data to flag warning signs - such as a missed bill payment, a phone being cut off or a child absent from school - to intervene to reduce homelessness, a problem Homewards said affected more than 430,000 people in Britain.

The prince said the data could help identify much earlier when somebody was getting into difficulties, allowing intervention that could help them stay in their homes, jobs and communities.

"Prevention is better than cure," he said, appealing to other companies and organizations to join the 25 already working with the lab.

William was shown an "Economic Wellbeing Explorer" map that uses anonymized data from NatWest to pinpoint homelessness risks in Lambeth, London, one of the six locations Homewards works in.

"It's game-changing stuff," he told Tim Siret, an analyst at Smart Data Foundry, a subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh, which created the explorer.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by William James)