Intended Audience: General
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BenCon 2024 Recap
A recap of the two-day conference focused on charting the course to excellence in digital benefits delivery hosted at Georgetown University and online.
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Visions for the Future at BenCon 2024
Leaders share their aspirations for excellence in digital benefits delivery and their reflections on BenCon and the work ahead.
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Cutting Child Poverty in Half and More: Pandemic-Era Lessons From Child and Family Advocates and Organizers
This paper discusses the country’s chronic underinvestment in children and resulting outcomes, including new data on poverty rates among young children, is inextricable from the prospects of young children; and the remarkably comprehensive pandemic-era response policies, including which changes contributed most to reducing child poverty.
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Who Audits the Auditors? Recommendations from a Field Scan of the Algorithmic Auditing Ecosystem
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.
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A list of open LLMs
These LLMs (Large Language Models) are all licensed for commercial use (e.g., Apache 2.0, MIT, OpenRAIL-M).
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From Pen to Processor: Training AI to Translate Handwritten Housing Applications: A FormFest 2025 Profile
A profile on FormFest spearker’s Barry Roeder, Barabara Deffenderfer, Glenn Brown, and Izzie Hirschy-Reyes highlighting how the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority and its partners use AI and human-centered design to streamline paper housing applications.
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Doing Radical Things Right: Ethical Good Practice for Basic Income Experiments
The paper hopes to stimulate discussions towards an ethical protocol for better practice in BI experiments and provide a useful resource to those working on, or interested in, BI research.
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Project Snapshot: Policy Rules Database
The Policy Rules Database (PRD), developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the National Center for Children in Poverty, consolidates complex rules for major U.S. federal and state benefit programs and tax policies into a standardized, easy-to-use format. This database allows researchers to model public assistance impacts, simulate policy changes, and analyze benefits cliffs across various household scenarios using common rules and language across different programming platforms.
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My File NYC — PATH Pilot Case Study
My File NYC is a document storage and sharing website that provides New York City residents a safe place to store and share vital documents when applying for City services.
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Digital Benefits Beacons: Where Policy Meets Practice at BenCon 2024
Michigan's UIA director, Julia Dale, is leading the agency through transition by prioritizing lived experience, hope, grit, and values. Virginia's SNAP Program Manager, Michele Thomas, highlighted the success of Sun Bucks, a summer EBT child nutrition program that fed over 700,000 kids in its first year.
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Digital Identity Updates from the Digital Benefits Network at BenCon 2024
Announcements include the Digital Identity Community of Practice, updates on research with NIST and CDT, and upcoming data set.
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Hoyas Lex Ad Codex at Policy2Code Demo Day at BenCon 2024
The team explored the performance of various AI chatbots and LLMs in supporting the adoption of Rules as Code for SNAP and Medicaid policies using policy data from Georgia and Oklahoma.