I’ll present ongoing work at Tulane’s Center for Community-Engaged AI partnering with local non-profits to build AI tools for transparency and accountability in criminal court and city government. I will first discuss our work with Eye on Surveillance, who have developed a retrieval-augmented generation tool over New Orleans city council transcripts (sawt.us). We have collaborated to use automated LLM evaluations and to engage with community users to improve the trustworthiness of the system. Second, I will discuss our work with Court Watch NOLA to build AI models for monitoring the equity in criminal court, including methods to estimating causal effects from text data. I will conclude with an overview of future directions in how generative AI can be used for a number of civic applications.
Co-creating Civic AI: Partnering Academia with Local Communities
Presentation Description
Presenter Bio
Aron Culotta
Dr. Culotta is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University and Director of the Tulane Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008, and his research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis, and their implications on society. His NSF-funded research has developed AI methods for several interdisciplinary projects in public health, marketing, political science, and emergency response. He has published over seventy academic articles on AI, serves on the steering committee of the International Conference on Web and Social Media, and has received best paper awards from the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing and from the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
