Collaborative Research: SGER: Computer-Assisted Interpretation of Citizen Input in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

这是一个与两个PI合作的赠款;印第安纳州的Javed Mostafa和哥伦比亚的大卫斯塔克。 知识分子的优点在美国国家科学基金会数字政府项目的资助下，大卫斯塔克一直在研究信息技术在9月11日世界贸易中心袭击后围绕重建下曼哈顿的公共辩论中的作用。在进行这项研究的过程中，斯塔克的团队收集了一个广泛的数字档案，其中包含来自一次市政厅会议的5,000名参与者的口头陈述，以及在“想象纽约设想研讨会”中在纽约市周围240个不同地点收集的19,000份口头陈述。这些收集的陈述为测试计算机辅助解释的各种策略提供了丰富的机会，因为它们提供了将人类智能识别的概念模式与通过人工智能分析方法获得的结果进行比较的机会。支持该档案的初步开发是该赠款的目的。该赠款的技术部分来自Javed Mostafa在NSF ITR赠款下所做的工作。数据挖掘研究集中在人类自发的对话是在早期的发展阶段。Mostafa的数据挖掘方法可以提供不同的方法来分析相同的数据。该项目有三个具体目标：1）通过应用不施加任何先验条件的技术来检测新兴概念; 2）通过对挖掘过程施加约束来使用分析已知概念的技术;以及3）开发结果的可视化，以方便社会科学家的解释并支持公民参与者的直接验证。广泛的影响计算机媒介通信为公民向民选官员和政府机构表达意见提供了新的渠道。通常，由此产生的大量评论构成了技术和政治挑战。官员/机构如何理解大规模的公民投入？如何有效地识别有意义的模式？该项目将有助于促进对计算机辅助口译的机会和局限性的了解。它的研究结果将引起学者和负责重建下曼哈顿的政府管理人员的极大兴趣。创建新的数据挖掘工具所面临的许多挑战需要跨学科的合作来访问新数据;本项目提供了这样一个机会。这种对人工智能方法的时间紧迫的测试对于了解公众对重建曼哈顿下城的投入至关重要。

This is a collaborative grant with two PIs; Javed Mostafa of Indiana, and David Stark of Columbia. Intellectual MeritWith a grant from the NSF Digital Government Program, David Stark has been studying the role of information technologies in the public debate surrounding the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In the process of conducting that research Stark's team has assembled an extensive digital archive containing 5,000 participant oral statements from one town hall meeting and an additional 19,000 oral statements collected at 240 different venues around New York City in the 'Imagine New York Envisioning Workshops'. These gathered statements provide a rich opportunity for testing various strategies of computer-assisted interpretation because they provide an opportunity to compare the conceptual patterns discerned by human intelligence with findings reached through the analytical methods of artificial intelligence. Supporting the initial explotation of that archive is the purpose of this grant.The technical component of this grant arises from work Javed Mostafa has done under an NSF ITR grant. Data mining research concentrating on spontaneous human conversations is at an early stage of development. Mostafa's approach to data mining can offer different ways to analyze the same data. The project has three specific goals: 1) to detect emergent concepts by applying techniques that do not impose any a priori conditions; 2) to use techniques for analyzing known concepts by applying constraints on the mining process, and 3) to develop visualization of the results to facilitate interpretation by social scientists and support direct validation by citizen participants. Broad Impact Computer mediated communication offers new channels for citizens to express their views to elected officials and government agencies. Often, the resulting deluge of comments poses a technical and political challenge. How can officials/agencies make sense of large-scale citizen input? How can meaningful patterns be efficiently and effectively identified? This project will contribute to advancing understanding of the opportunities and the limitations of computer-assisted interpretation. Its findings will be of considerable interest to scholars as well as to government managers responsible for the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. Summary Many challenges involved in creating new data mining tools demands an interdisciplinary collaboration for access to new data; this project offers such an opportunity. This time-critical testing of artificial intelligence methods will be important in understanding the public input to rebuilding lower Manhattan.