Good Systems

The Austin AI Housing Analysis is a Year 2 Good Systems Project that aims to build a predictive AI system that can test past and future regulatory scenarios and help inform affordable residential development policies in Austin. This talk will cover preliminary research to date into how affordable housing in Austin has changed over time and how developmental policies over the past several decades have both encouraged and discouraged affordable housing differently throughout the city.

Junfeng Jiao is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the chair of UT Good Systems Grand Challenge, chair of the Smart City Bridging Discipline Program, and director of the Urban Information Lab. Junfeng’s research focuses on urban informatics and machine learning, particularly how different technologies come together to create smart cities and how those affect people’s behaviors. He coined the term of “transit desert” and measured it in all major U.S. cities. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the NSF, the Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of Transportation, the Washington Department of Transportation, UT Austin, Intel, and Google and reported by popular national media outlets such as ABC, Associated Press, CNN, CityLab, Fox News, NBC, NPR, New York Times, and Wired. He received his doctorate in urban planning and design from the University of Washington.

Josh Conrad is a doctoral candidate in the School of Architecture studying new GIS methodologies for building and landscape research. He is currently a data researcher with the Urban Information Lab as well as with UT Libraries. His doctoral research studies the history and future of equity-oriented GIS data practices in historic preservation. Additionally, he works professionally as a data consultant with the historic preservation firm HHM & Associates in Austin.

Part of the Smart Cities Consortium.

COGSEC will be a two-day, virtual event March 4-5 focusing on practical skills related to investigating and thwarting media manipulation and disinformation campaigns online.

The online conference will serve as a forum for sharing what works and what doesn’t, for piecing together knowledge about the state-of-the-art tactics being used by malicious actors in the field, and for building the ethical norms of security research in this domain. 

COGSEC will feature practical workshops on hunting and neutralizing online influence campaigns. We welcome students, scholars, journalists, activists, NGO professionals, and anyone with an interest in the real-world tools and techniques being used to deal with media manipulation threats in the field.

Registration is now open!

What does it mean for AI to be innovative, and does new always mean better, particularly in terms of the ethical and societal implications of AI? This presentation, drawing on an interview study of 26 stakeholders of AI drawn from the fields of policy, law, and technology, articulates the relationship between ongoing AI innovation, regulation, and implementation through the views of cross-sectoral stakeholders, highlighting the interconnected and knotted nature of their concerns. This work has been nominated for Best Short Paper at the 2021 iConference.

Stephen C. Slota is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the UT iSchool. His research interests include knowledge infrastructures, information policy, and the ethics and values of Data Science and AI.

Part of the Good Systems Postdoc Interest Group spring 2021 meeting series.

In this talk, Yueyue Fan will share a new error estimation method for identifying systematic errors for sensors deployed in a traffic network.  This approach integrates statistics and transportation domain knowledge, specifically the spatial interdependence of traffic flows, to enable identification of the health conditions of road sensors as well as correction of the biased data.

Dr. Yueyue Fan is a professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Davis.  She is currently serving as the program director of the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) program at the National Science Foundation.  Her research is on transportation and energy infrastructure systems modeling and analysis, with special interest in integrating applied mathematics and engineering domain knowledge to address challenges brought by system uncertainty, dynamics, and indeterminacy issues.

Part of the Smart Cities Consortium.

Tara Zimmerman (Postdoctoral fellow, School of Information) will present on “Social Noise: How Relationships Influence the Spread of Disinformation. ” Email goodsystems@austin.utexas.edu to request the meeting information.

Fireside Chat: The Importance of Sharing Work Globally on AI and Ethics
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Welcome: Jay Hartzell
President, The University of Texas at Austin

Fireside chat featuring: Kay Firth-Butterfield
Head of AI & ML, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum
Fellow, Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, The University of Texas at Austin 

Panel Chair: Sharon Strover
Good Systems Executive Team Member, The University of Texas at Austin

Panelists: Christine Dixon Thiesing (Associate Vice President for Research Innovation and Economic Impact, The University of Texas at Austin), Junfeng Jiao (Good Systems Executive Team Chair, The University of Texas at Austin), S. Craig Watkins (Good Systems Research Director for Racial Justice, The University of Texas at Austin) 

Part of the Week with the World Economic Forum events taking place March 22 – 26, 2021.

Workshop for Graduate Students
Closed session

This workshop for graduate students helps them understand how to advance technology policy generally, and AI policy specifically.

Welcome from Eric Meyer (Dean, School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin), facilitated by Kenneth R. Fleischmann (Founding Chair, Good Systems Executive Team), and presentations from Kay Firth-Butterfield (Head of AI & ML, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum and Fellow, Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, The University of Texas at Austin), and Conor Sanchez (Project Specialist, World Economic Forum). 

Part of the Week with the World Economic Forum events taking place March 22 – 26, 2021.

Panel: AI Procurement Policy for State, Regional, and Local Governments 
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The WEF procurement guidelines were designed for national governments. But state, regional, and local governments will also purchase AI technologies. How can procurement guidelines be helpful to local governments as they think about purchasing AI technologies that will help them create smart cities? 

Welcome from Michelle Addington (Dean, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin). Panel chair is Kay Firth-Butterfield (Head of AI & ML, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum and Fellow, Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, The University of Texas at Austin).

Panelists include Coral Evans (Former Mayor of Flagstaff, AZ)), Alex Goldberg (Texas Strategic Engagement Lead, Defense Innovation Unit), Sherri Greenberg (Good Systems Research Director for Future of Work, The University of Texas at Austin), Jeff Merritt (Head of Internet of Things and Urban Transformation and Member of Executive Committee, World Economic Forum), and Kirk Scanlon (Capital Improvement Program Manager, Austin Transportation Department’s Smart Mobility Office)  

Part of the Week with the World Economic Forum events taking place March 22 – 26, 2021

Panel: Industry Response to Government Procurement Policy 
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Companies that develop and sell AI technologies to governments discuss how procurement guidelines influenced or will influence product development. Before and after examples show how privacy, transparency, fairness, and other ethical considerations can be embedded into AI technologies. 

Welcome from Lillian F. Mills (Interim Dean, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin). Panel chair is Joydeep Ghosh (Good Systems Research Director for Fair and Transparent AI, The University of Texas at Austin)

Panelists include Stephen Elkins (Texas Client Director, Microsoft), Steve Elmore (Head of Client Services, KUNGFU.AI), and Will Griffin (Chief Ethics Officer, Hypergiant).

Part of the Week with the World Economic Forum events taking place March 22 – 26, 2021.

Panel: An International View of Smart Cities and Procurement
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This international panel explores a variety of global perspectives that describe how procurement practices will influence the development of smart cities. Topics will include the ethical and practical implications of surveillance, social services, and autonomous delivery and transportation.

Welcome from Jennifer Lyon Gardner (Deputy Vice President for Research, The University of Texas at Austin). Panel Chair is Junfeng Jiao (Good Systems Executive Team Chair, The University of Texas at Austin).

Panelists include Maria De-Arteaga (Assistant Professor, Information, Risk and Operation Management, The University of Texas at Austin), Kay Firth-Butterfield (Head of AI & ML, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum and Fellow, Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, The University of Texas at Austin), Hwanyong Kim (Associate Professor, College of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, Hanyang University), and Tuan Nguyen (Deputy Director of Community & Brand, SGInnovate, Singapore). 

Part of the Week with the World Economic Forum events taking place March 22 – 26, 2021.

We use natural language processing technique to construct sentiment index from social media; we link the sentiment index with extreme weather conditions and COVID-19 shocks to quantify their negative impacts on people’s expressed sentiment; we explore the heterogeneity across countries and different population groups, and the underlying mechanisms.

Dr. Siqi Zheng is the Samuel Tak Lee Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Center for Real Estate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She established MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab  in 2019, and MIT China Future City Lab in 2017 (which later became the “China Future City Program” under the new Sustainable Urbanization Lab), and is the faculty director of her Lab. She is the Associate Editor of China Economic Review, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Economic Surveys, and is on the editorial board of Journal of Housing Economics and Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA).

Part of the Smart Cities Consortium.

Pecan Street works with advanced energy systems including smart inverters, energy storage, controlled electric vehicle charging, HVAC demand response and V2G system testing, as well as residential electrical system issues that are not being addressed by these technologies. 

Scott Hinson is the CTO of Pecan Street Inc. Prior to joining Pecan Street he worked at a thin film CIGS solar module manufacturer where he led module packaging, performance, certification and reliability efforts. Additional efforts include work in the military, medical, consumer and oil industries developing power supplies, precision measurement equipment and inductive heating technologies. 

Part of the Smart Cities Consortium.

Dhiraj Murthy (Professor, School of Journalism and Media) will share his COVID-related work: “Classifying COVID-19-related disinformation and misinformation using crowdsourcing and machine learning.” Email goodsystems@austin.utexas.edu to request the meeting information.