Building on our February 2022 report Benefit Eligibility Rules as Code: Reducing the Gap Between Policy and Service Delivery for the Safety Net, the Beeck Center’s Digital Benefits Network (DBN) hosted Rules as Code Demo Day on June 28, 2022 where there were eight demonstrations of projects and code followed by a collaborative problem solving session on how to continue advancing rules as code for the U.S. social safety net.
MITRE’s Joe Ditre and Frank Ruscil demoed the code for the Comprehensive Careers and Supports for Households (C-CASH) at Rules as Code Demo Day. The MITRE team expanded the accessibility of the Policy Rules Database and the Cost-of-Living Database (the prior demo) by creating a web service API and a front-end Window’s application called C-CASH Analytic Tool (CAT). CAT provides a more scalable, flexible, and portable functionality which allows end-users to generate various households to run eligibility scenarios across different U.S. counties and states. They are currently working to create a national data hub and analytics tool, starting with utilizing U.S. Census data and populating the data warehouse by pushing large amounts of data through the PRD.
The U.S. Digital Response collaborated with a state workforce agency to develop a multilingual, user-friendly system for retroactive Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) applications, enhancing claimant comprehension and reducing administrative strain.
This simulator, created by the Joint Financial Management and Improvement Program (JFMIP), allows users to model program performance for a hypothetical government program, based on different identity verification decisions. The simulator illustrates concepts from the JFMIP report on payment integrity.
Joint Financial Management and Improvement Program (JFMIP)
On December 5, 2022, an expert panel, including representatives from the White House, unpacked what’s included in the AI Bill of Rights, and explored how to operationalize such guidance among consumers, developers, and other users designing and implementing automated decisions.
Usability tests can help teams develop products that are user-centered, accessible, and inclusive. This guide will help you conduct a successful usability test, from coordinating with participants to analyzing your findings.
Through a field scan, this paper identifies emerging best practices as well as methods and tools that are becoming commonplace, and enumerates common barriers to leveraging algorithmic audits as effective accountability mechanisms.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
This paper argues that a human rights framework could help orient the research on artificial intelligence away from machines and the risks of their biases, and towards humans and the risks to their rights, helping to center the conversation around who is harmed, what harms they face, and how those harms may be mitigated.
