Engineering for Efficiency and Equity in Resident Crowdsourcing

Speaker: Nikhil Garg , Cornell Tech

Date: Thursday, November 02, 2023

Time: 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Public: Yes

Location:

Event Type: Seminar

Room Description:

Host: Divya Shanmugam, CSAIL MIT

Contact: Divya Shanmugam, divyas@mit.edu

Relevant URL:

Speaker URL: http://gargnikhil.com

Speaker Photo:
None

Reminders to: seminars@csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: Engineering for Efficiency and Equity in Resident Crowdsourcing

Room: 32-370

Abstract: Modern city governance relies heavily on crowdsourcing to identify problems such as downed trees and power-lines. Two major concerns are that (1) residents do not report problems at the same rates and (2) agencies differentially respond to reports, leading to an inefficient and inequitable allocation of government resources. However, measuring and correcting such under-reporting and differential responses are challenging statistical tasks: ground truth incident and risk distributions may differ by area, and, almost by definition, we do not observe incidents that are not reported. We develop statistical methods to overcoming such missing and censored data challenges, leveraging domain-specific information such as duplicate reports and spatial correlation. We apply our methods to over 100,000 resident reports made to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, finding that there are substantial spatial and socio-economic disparities, even after controlling for incident characteristics. Finally, I'll overview our work in translating the data science/machine learning insights to practice, to influence agency response to reports.

Research Areas:
Algorithms & Theory, AI & Machine Learning

Impact Areas:

This event is not part of a series.

Created by Divya Shanmugam at Friday, October 06, 2023 at 10:52 AM.