EAGER: AI-DCL: Exploratory research on the use of AI at the intersection of homelessness and child maltreatment

无家可归和住房不安全是提供社会服务的根本挑战。没有稳定的住所增加了家庭所有成员，包括儿童，经历这种不安全状况的不良后果的风险。该项目是一项探索性研究，旨在利用人工智能(AI)的技术改进早期筛查，并向面临未来无家可归和虐待儿童风险的家庭提供有针对性的援助。该小组将寻求开发新的方法，将稀缺的住房支助资源分配给有风险的家庭，同时考虑到总体效率和公平。这项工作将需要在人工智能中提出新的问题和开发算法，并创建新的伦理方法，以决定如何有效地提供社会服务，同时考虑到人类行为的巨大复杂性。此外，减少无家可归和虐待儿童的风险是关键的社会目标，有可能极大地改善我们许多最弱势公民的生活。该项目将探讨使用新的算法技术为社会决策提供关于分配稀缺资源的信息的可行性，具体目标是改善无家可归者和儿童福利服务系统的成果。该小组的重点将是预防无家可归的干预措施，提供及时、不再发生的资源，以稳定面临住房危机风险的家庭；此类资源的例子包括房东调解、一次性租金或水电费支付以及搬家费用。他们将在研究中利用关于儿童福利和无家可归的独特数据集，并利用这些数据集为机器学习方法的设计提供信息，以预测结果(特别是无家可归的重复发生和未来与儿童保护服务的互动)，以及利用这些预测的优化技术，以决定哪些家庭应作为预防干预的目标。在总体分配必须改善社会福利(从多个维度衡量)并满足在分配稀缺资源时的公平、公平和地方正义的概念的背景下，预测和优化的相互作用对AI来说是一个具有挑战性的领域。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Homelessness and housing insecurity present fundamental challenges for the delivery of social services. The absence of stable accommodations increases the risks of poor outcomes for all members of the household, including children, experiencing this insecurity. This project is an exploratory study in the use of techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) to improve early screening and the delivery of targeted assistance to households that are at risk of future homelessness and child maltreatment. The team will seek to develop novel methods for allocation of scarce housing-support resources to at-risk households, taking into account considerations of both overall efficiency and fairness. This work will necessitate novel problem formulation and algorithm development in AI as well as creating new ethical methods for deciding on how to effectively deliver social services taking into account the vast complexity of human behavior. Moreover, reducing the risks of homelessness and child maltreatment are critical societal goals with the potential to substantively improve the lives of many of our most vulnerable citizens.This project will explore the feasibility of using novel algorithmic techniques to inform societal decision-making on the allocation of scarce resources, with the specific goal of improving service system outcomes for both homelessness and child welfare. The team's focus will be on homelessness prevention interventions that offer timely, non-reoccurring resources to stabilize families at risk of experiencing housing crises; examples of such resources include landlord mediation, one-time rent or utility payments, and moving expenses. They will leverage unique datasets on child welfare and homelessness in the research, and use these to inform the design of machine learning approaches to prediction of outcomes (specifically, repeat episodes of homelessness and future interactions with child protective services), and optimization techniques that leverage these predictions in order to decide on which households to target for prevention interventions. The interplay of prediction and optimization, in a context where the overall allocation must both improve social welfare (measured along multiple dimensions) and satisfy notions of fairness, equity, and local justice in the allocation of scarce resources, is a challenging domain for AI.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.