In 2010, Haiti's 7.0 magnitude earthquake resulted in more than 200,000 deaths and more than one million homeless. This event recaptured the attention of international society regarding disaster-related governmental policies and legislation. In 2011, Resolution 7 of the International Conference of the Red Cross reiterated the urgency for states to be prepared to facilitate and regulate any international disaster assistance, using the Guidelines for the domestic facilitation and regulation of international disaster relief and initial recovery assistance (also known as the “IDRL Guidelines”). The International Conference adopted these guidelines in 2007; nevertheless, several countries did not implement the recommendations of the IDRL guidelines before the Haiti earthquake. Such was the case of Ecuador, which, after 2010, began to work on the implementation of the IDRL guidelines. In the beginning, public officials were very skeptical about the IDRL Guidelines as a tool for mitigating the consequences of disasters.

The term, Artificial Intelligence (AI), has changed since it was first coined by John MacCarthy in 1956. AI, believed to have been created with Kurt Gödel's unprovable computational statements in 1931, is now called deep learning or machine learning. AI is defined as a computer machine with the ability to make predictions about the future and solve complex tasks, using algorithms. The AI algorithms are enhanced and become effective with big data capturing the present and the past while still necessarily reflecting human biases into models and equations. AI is also capable of making choices like humans, mirroring human reasoning. AI can help robots to efficiently repeat the same labor intensive procedures in factories and can analyze historic and present data efficiently through deep learning, natural language processing, and anomaly detection. Thus, AI covers a spectrum of augmented intelligence relating to prediction, autonomous intelligence relating to decision making, automated intelligence for labor robots, and assisted intelligence for data analysis.