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Caseworkers in the child welfare (CW) sector use predictive decision-making algorithms built on risk assessment (RA) data to guide and support CW decisions. Researchers have highlighted that RAs can contain biased signals which flatten CW…
The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is charged with improving outcomes for foster youth; yet, they are overburdened and underfunded. To overcome this limitation, several states have turned towards algorithmic decision-making systems to…
Risk assessment algorithms are being adopted by public sector agencies to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. Algorithms model "risk" based on individual client characteristics to identify clients most in need. However, this…
Caseworkers are trained to write detailed narratives about families in Child-Welfare (CW) which informs collaborative high-stakes decision-making. Unlike other administrative data, these narratives offer a more credible source of…
Algorithms in public services such as child welfare, criminal justice, and education are increasingly being used to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. Drawing upon findings from a two-year ethnography conducted at a child welfare…
The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is increasingly seeking to emulate business models of the private sector centered in efficiency, cost reduction, and innovation through the adoption of algorithms. These data-driven systems purportedly…
The algorithmic fairness of predictive analytic tools in the public sector has increasingly become a topic of rigorous exploration. While instruments pertaining to criminal recidivism and academic admissions, for example, have garnered much…
Child welfare agencies across the United States are turning to data-driven predictive technologies (commonly called predictive analytics) which use government administrative data to assist workers' decision-making. While some prior work has…
Algorithmic risk assessment tools are now commonplace in public sector domains such as criminal justice and human services. These tools are intended to aid decision makers in systematically using rich and complex data captured in…
Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant…
Working memory (WM), a fundamental cognitive process facilitating the temporary storage, integration, manipulation, and retrieval of information, plays a vital role in reasoning and decision-making tasks. Robust benchmark datasets that…
Despite algorithms' potential to improve public services, adoption has been limited by concerns about effectiveness and equity. We conduct a randomized controlled trial ($N=4,681$) providing real-time algorithm support to Child Protective…
AI-based decision support tools (ADS) are increasingly used to augment human decision-making in high-stakes, social contexts. As public sector agencies begin to adopt ADS, it is critical that we understand workers' experiences with these…
Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to help humans make decisions in high-stakes settings, such as medicine, criminal justice and education. In each of these cases, the purpose of the risk assessment tool is to inform…
In this paper, we propose a new Soft Confidence-Weighted (SCW) online learning scheme, which enables the conventional confidence-weighted learning method to handle non-separable cases. Unlike the previous confidence-weighted learning…
Human services systems make key decisions that impact individuals in the society. The U.S. child welfare system makes such decisions, from screening-in hotline reports of suspected abuse or neglect for child protective investigations,…
Governments are the primary providers of essential public services and are responsible for delivering them effectively. In high-stakes decision-making domains such as child welfare (CW), agencies must protect children without unnecessarily…
We propose the use of Agent Based Models (ABMs) inside a reinforcement learning framework in order to better understand the relationship between automated decision making tools, fairness-inspired statistical constraints, and the social…
With the proliferation of the Large Language Model (LLM), the concept of World Models (WM) has recently attracted a great deal of attention in the AI research community, especially in the context of AI agents. It is arguably evolving into…
A high-risk pregnancy is a pregnancy complicated by factors that can adversely affect the outcomes of the mother or the infant. Health insurers use algorithms to identify members who would benefit from additional clinical support. This work…