Constantine Kontokosta Awarded NSF Grant

The Marron Institute’s Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, and Professor Daniel Neill have been awarded an Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Society by the National Science Foundation. The project focuses on bias and discrimination in city predictive analytics, and seeks to understand disparities in citizen-reported data and the potential impact on the fairness of cities’ resource allocation decisions. Such reporting data carry systematic biases resulting from persistent spatial, racial, and economic inequality. Consequently, predictive urban analytics based on citizen complaint data can result in discriminatory outcomes and reinforce existing disparities. The investigators will develop a new methodological framework, integrating multiple data sources and incorporating approaches from machine learning and urban planning, for assessing, quantifying, and correcting for data bias in urban AI models to address social equity and fairness in city decision-making.