This paper describes results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice.
CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
This paper introduces the problem of semi-automatically building decision models from eligibility policies for social services, and presents an initial emerging approach to shorten the route from policy documents to executable, interpretable and standardised decision models using AI, NLP and Knowledge Graphs. There is enormous potential of AI to assist government agencies and policy experts in scaling the production of both human-readable and machine executable policy rules, while improving transparency, interpretability, traceability and accountability of the decision making.
This issue brief illustrates the challenges that many older adults with low income face in gaining access to benefits online. It addresses digital literacy, access to broadband internet, and the increasing prevalence of connecting online to SNAP.
This brief highlights the complex journey that older adults experience when applying for and enrolling in SNAP, including the major barriers and solutions that improve access along the way.
This book explores the current capabilities, future possibilities, and necessary governance for facial recognition technology. The report discusses legal, societal, and ethical implications of the technology, and recommends ways that federal agencies and others developing and deploying the technology can mitigate potential harms and enact more comprehensive safeguards.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
This report highlights key findings from the Rules as Code Community of Practice, including practitioners' challenges with complex policies, their desire to share knowledge and resources, the need for increased training and support, and a collective interest in developing open standards and a shared code library.
The DBN’s Rules as Code Community of Practice (RaC CoP) creates a shared learning and exchange space for people working on public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems — and specifically people tackling the issue of how policy becomes software code. The RaC CoP brings together cross-sector experts who share approaches, examples, and challenges. Participants are from state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academia, and private sector companies. We host recurring roundtable conversations and an email group for asynchronous updates, insights, and assistance.
This systematic review examines prior studies to offer a definition of digital identity wallets, addressing the growing interest in the concept amid the lack of a generally accepted definition or its features.
Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)
What exactly are the differences between generative AI, large language models, and foundation models? This post aims to clarify what each of these three terms mean, how they overlap, and how they differ.
Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET)
Safeguarding privacy and addressing algorithmic bias can pose an under-recognized trade-off. This brief documents tradeoffs by examining the U.S. government’s recent efforts to introduce government-wide equity assessments of federal programs. The authors propose a range of policy solutions that would enable agencies to navigate the privacy-bias trade-off.
