CIVIC-PG Track B: Economic Resiliency through Mechanism Design and Secure Computing: MainStreetPulse: An Early Warning Platform for Monitoring and Supporting Main Street Businesses

该项目寻求使用加密、激励措施和公开可用的数据更好地了解波士顿个别小企业和主街商业区的健康状况。使用这些技术，该市可以改善对主街地区的规划建议，并主动识别陷入困境的企业，进行有针对性的干预和支持。该项目最终旨在创造可复制的工具，所有城市都可以使用这些工具来保护和发展作为美国经济支柱的小企业部门，根据美国劳工统计局的数据，小企业部门占所有经济活动的44%，占美国所有员工的47%。它还将提供工具，以防止和减轻企业关闭对主要街道地区的影响。在SARS-CoV-2大流行的头几个月里，这一挑战变得更加尖锐，当时估计有10万家企业被迫关闭，这一数量远远高于每年退出的约60万家企业。为了实现这一点，研究团队将利用机制设计和安全计算开发一个预测模型和用户友好的应用程序。城市规划者和单个企业可以使用设想中的云原生工具来做出关键决策，如位置引用、租金和工资预算以及销售预测，以利用预计的人口迁移。第一阶段的研究问题主要围绕设计一种机制的可行性，以现有数据源的应用以及企业主由于应用机制设计和安全计算技术而提供的敏感数据为基础，设计一种机制来预测小企业的困境或倒闭。该模型将在第二阶段的试点中进行邻里规模的测试。参与者将被鼓励贡献商业数据，因为安全的多方计算将允许团队在永远无法访问原始数据的情况下开发模型。该项目是对公民创新挑战计划的回应-轨道B-弥合基本资源与服务和社区需求之间的差距-是NSF、国土安全部和能源部的合作。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The project seeks to better understand the health of individual small businesses and Main Street business districts in Boston using cryptography, incentives, and publicly available data. Using these techniques, the city can improve planning recommendations for Main Street Districts and proactively identify distressed businesses for targeted interventions and support. The project ultimately aims to create replicable tools that can be used by all cities to protect and grow the small business sector which serves as the backbone of the American economy, accounting for 44% of all economic activity and 47% of all U.S. employees, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It will also provide tools to prevent and mitigate the impact of business closures on Main Street districts. This challenge became even more acute during the first months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic when an estimated 100,000 businesses were forced to close, a volume much higher than the approximately 600,000 business that exit each year.To achieve this, the research team will develop a predictive model and a user-friendly application using mechanism design and secure computation. The envisioned cloud-native tool can be used by city planners and by individual businesses to make critical decisions such as location citing, rent and payroll budgets, and sales forecasts that leverage projected population shifts. The research questions for Stage 1 are primarily centered around the feasibility of designing a mechanism to predict the distress or closure of small businesses, based on the application of existing data sources along with sensitive data contributed by business owners as a result of the application of mechanism design and secure computation techniques. This model will be tested at the neighborhood scale in the Stage 2 pilot. Participants will be incentivized to contribute business data, because secure multi-party computation will allow the team to develop the model without ever having access to the original data.This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.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.