Lindsey Piercy: UK Researcher Enhances Police De-Escalation Training with Immersive AI, VR Simulations

De-escalation training is a vital tool for police officers — helping to reduce the need for force and ensuring safer outcomes for everyone involved in a tense situation.

Yet, navigating these high-pressure moments is far from simple.

Stephen Ware, associate professor in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky, has been working to enhance officer training through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR).

“We’re trying to use technology to do something good — to create intelligent training for de-escalation with the purpose of calming everyone down and creating a safe environment for police officers and the community they serve,” he said.

In 2022, Ware received the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, “Structured High-Agency Interactive Narratives for Virtual Environments.”

The honor is one of the “most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate education and research within the context of their organization’s mission,” according to the NSF.

With the award, Ware received more than $530,000 over five years to conduct research and create the immersive police training for de-escalation.

“My team of graduate students and I have been working on this project for about five years,” he continued. When you’ve got an interactive story that could go thousands of different ways, we need to decide what the non-player characters should do. We often need to look five, 10, maybe even 20 steps ahead — to make sure we have the structure and content the story needs to contain.”

The unique training environment is designed to be not only highly immersive but also exceptionally realistic — creating a simulation that closely mirrors real-world scenarios and fully engages participants in a way that enhances learning and retention.

“Not just any sequence of events will do. You put a human player into this situation, and especially if it’s someone who maybe hasn’t played a lot of video games before, they do all kinds of unexpected things,” Ware said. “Having an algorithm that can respond to those unexpected situations and still create a believable and useful training simulation is really challenging. Navigating those trillions of possibilities and figuring out which ones are going to seem realistic and are going to be a useful training exercise is the computer science challenge behind what we’re doing.”

Recently, officers from the UK Police Department participated in a simulation they helped design, drawing from a real-life experience in the field.

“The entire simulation is better than what I’ve experienced in the past,” said UKPD’s Lt. Robert McPherson. “AI is able to take a situation in various directions, and as the participant, you have to think on your feet.”

“The AI is basically solving a complex game theory problem about how characters can maximize the good outcomes and prevent the bad outcomes,” Ware added. “When best practices are broken, we’re making sure you see the consequences of those actions.”

Ware, who started at UK in 2019, directs the Narrative Intelligence Lab and teaches artificial intelligence and game development courses. His work has earned three best paper awards to date. Since 2014, he has received more than $2.4 million in sponsored research funding from federal, state and local agencies. Ware serves as a referee for the IEEE Transactions on Games journal and as an organizer for top conferences and workshops in his field, such as the AAAI international conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment.

“I like waking up every morning and working on something that no one’s ever done before. There’s a small, but growing, artificial intelligence research community that’s working on storytelling,” he said. “And I love to collaborate with those people to train the next generation of students that are working on these problems and to say, ‘Hey, it would be really cool if AI could do this. No one currently has a solution. I wonder if we can design it.’”

Additionally, the Pigman College of Engineering offers an AI certificate — allowing degree-seeking undergraduate students an opportunity to explore AI technologies from several perspectives. Learn more about the program here. You can also view an extended video here.