Research

City data made simple

Council Data Project transforms recordings of local government meetings into easily searchable transcripts available online

By Jim Davis

The idea grew out of a disagreement. Eva Maxfield Brown was an undergraduate student six years ago at the Information School. She was paying close attention to a controversial issue before the Seattle City Council to allow a new NBA arena to be built in the SoDo District. So was one of her professors, Nic Weber.

When the vote occurred, they read about it the following day. They disagreed on why a council member voted a certain way and even whether that member’s vote was decisive. So they sought out the council meeting recording.

“It took us a surprising amount of time to find the recording of that meeting,” said Weber, who is an assistant professor at the iSchool. “Once we found the recording, it was a matter of searching through it. We both had somewhat different takes (on what the council member said). What we shared in common was a sense that this can and should be easier.”

Together, they knew that the machine learning and artificial intelligence tools taught at the iSchool could help.

“We decided, ‘Let’s make city council meetings easier to follow,’” Brown said.

So they developed the Council Data Project, a website that creates searchable transcripts of city council and committee meetings as well as establishing a way to track legislation and voting records of elected officials. Now in its third iteration, the Council Data Project compiles transcripts from 17 cities across the U.S. with more soon to come.

At first, Weber and Brown expected that this would be a tool used by the public. While that happens, Weber, Brown and other volunteers have found four groups that repeatedly use the tool: journalists, researchers, activists and city staff.

One of those using the Council Data Project is Arica Schuett, a Ph.D. student at Emory University in Georgia. In her work, she’s looking at social movements such as Black Lives Matter. She is working on a theory that activists who are more specific in what they want to accomplish can more easily get those demands enacted into policy than those who are imprecise. A colleague who studied at the UW introduced her to the Council Data Project. Schuett said, “It almost sounded too good to be true.” She’s beginning to use the meeting transcripts in her research. “So what it’s meant for me is that I can test this theory at scale and with a variety of different cities in ways that I couldn’t previously have done,” Schuett said. Nic Weber Another person who uses the Council Data Project is Philip James, who advocates for housing in the Bay Area city of Alameda where he grew up and owns a home. James found the Council Data Project on the internet. “I knew that having a tool like this would actually be invaluable because most civic governments are making

Eva progress in terms of making the recordings and the data Maxfield of their meetings available, but not very accessible,”

Brown James said. He reached out to the Council Data Project, which set up a location in his community. He’s volunteered to assist with the project. James, who is a chief technology officer for a startup, sees a housing crisis in the East Bay Area, where most people of his generation are unable to afford a home. He said the Council Data Project has kept people clued into the civic conversation. “It’s been extraordinarily useful for getting quick summaries of what has happened at recent meetings,” James said. “And I have seen people on Alameda politics Twitter starting to link to meetings in the Council Data Project instance.”

Updates

Led by its co-director, Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock, the CREATE research center conducted the first large-scale longitudinal analysis of missing label failures in Android applications . The team analyzed 312 popular applications and found that 55 .6 percent of unique image-based elements were inaccessible . CREATE is the Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences . Wobbrock was also the co-senior author on a paper describing VoxLens, an opensource JavaScript plug-in that improves the accessibility of online data visualizations using a single line of code . VoxLens enables screen-reader users to obtain a summary of the information in a visualization and interact with the data . Taskbased experiments with screen-reader users showed VoxLens improved the accuracy of information extraction and interaction time by 122 percent and 36 percent, respectively .

Ph .D . candidate Shruti Phadke was the lead author and Assistant Professor Tanu Mitra the senior author on the ICWSM

Alexia Lozano

Peggy Watt is an associate professor in journalism at Western Washington University. She’s also a longtime board member of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit that advocates for the people’s right to access government information.

She said that forward-thinking cities are being innovative in increasing transparency. Bellingham, for instance, is posting videos of city council meetings with links to navigate agenda topics. She said she was a fan of the Council Data Project, especially the ability to search transcripts. She noted that “not everybody can go down there and sit at the city council meetings.”

“It was interesting to see that the information was so easily accessible through this,” Watt said. “As a resident, as a journalist and as a journalism professor, I’m in favor of anything that makes public information more accessible to people.”

In Montana, volunteers set up a location that has created transcripts for the City of Missoula. They’ve also used the tool to provide transcripts of congressional debates and are working to use it to create transcripts of meetings of the Montana Legislature.

DemocracyLab Executive Director Mark Frischmuth was the one who brought the Council Data Project to Montana, working

CITY DATA, continued on Page 36

2022 Best Paper Award recipient, Pathways through Conspiracy: The Evolution of Conspiracy Radicalization through Engagement in Online Conspiracy Discussions . Conference organizers noted the paper “shines a light on an important yet under-attended aspect of the radicalization problem .” ICWSM is the International Conference on Web and Social Media . Associate Professor Katie Davis, along with Mega Subramaniam of the University of Maryland, guest edited a special issue of Information and Learning Sciences: “Beyond Digital Youth: Understanding, Supporting, and Designing for Young People’s Digital Experiences .” Among the issue’s 10 published works is an introductory essay by Davis and Subramaniam and a paper by a team led by Associate Professor Jason Yip, titled “Youth Invisible Work: The Sociocultural and Collaborative Processes of Online Search and Brokering Between Adolescents and English-language Learning Families .

Katie Davis

Actions to slow misinfo make an impact, CIP finds

Social media platforms have the ability to slow the spread of misinformation by using certain interventions, according to research from the UW Center for an Informed Public . A combination of actions such as fact-checking, slowing people’s ability to repost content, and banning misinformation super-spreaders can significantly reduce viral misinformation, the researchers found in a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour. The spread of a fact-checked piece of misinformation can be reduced by 55 percent to 93 percent, the researchers found . A misinforming post had 15 percent less engagement and was shared 5 percent less when people were urged to repost carefully . Banning verified accounts known to spread misinformation reduced engagement with false posts by nearly 13 percent . The CIP research team included Joe Bak-Coleman, Ian Kennedy, Morgan Wack, Andrew Beers, Joseph S . Schafer, Emma S . Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin D . West . Their paper provides a framework to evaluate interventions aimed at reducing viral misinformation online . The researchers found that commonly proposed interventions are unlikely to be effective in isolation . However, their framework demonstrates that a combined approach can achieve a reduction in the prevalence of misinformation .

‘CEO’ bias persists in Google image search

By Sarah McQuate, UW News

We use Google’s image search to help us understand the world around us. For example, a search about “truck driver” should yield images that show us a representative smattering of people who drive trucks for a living.

But in 2015, University of Washington researchers found that when searching for a variety of occupations — including “CEO” — women were significantly underrepresented in the image results, and that these results can change searchers’ worldviews. Since then, Google has claimed to have fixed this issue.

A different UW team led by iSchool Professor Chirag Shah recently investigated the company’s veracity. The researchers showed that for four major search engines from around the world, including Google, this bias is only partially fixed, according to a paper presented at the 2022 AAAI Conference of Artificial Intelligence. A search for an occupation, such as “CEO,” yielded results with a ratio of cis-male Chirag Shah and cis-female presenting people that match the current statistics. But when the team added another search term — for example, “CEO + United States” — the image search returned fewer photos of cis-female presenting people. “My lab has been working on the issue of bias in search results Yunhe Feng for a while, and we wondered if this CEO image search bias had only been fixed on the surface,” said Shah, the senior author and co-director of the iSchool-based RAISE research center. RAISE stands for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences. “We wanted to be able to show that this is a problem that can be systematically fixed for all search terms, instead of something that has to be fixed with this kind of ‘whack-a-mole’ approach, one problem at a time.”

The team investigated image search results for Google as well as for China’s search engine Baidu, South Korea’s Naver and Russia’s Yandex.

“This is a common approach to studying machine learning systems,” said lead author Yunhe Feng, a postdoctoral fellow in the iSchool. “Similar to how people do crash tests on cars to make sure they are safe, privacy and security researchers try to challenge computer systems to see how well they hold up. Here, we just changed the search term slightly. We didn’t expect to see such different outputs.”

Updates

Assistant Professor Mike Teodorescu was the lead author on both the Best Paper recipient and the Best Paper Runner-Up at the Academy of Management’s Technology Innovation Management Conference . The winning paper analyzed interventions meant to improve low-resource inventors’ ability to secure patents from the U .S . Patent and Trademark Office . Decision Making with Youth Impacted by Chronic Kidney Disease . The project will be a 5-year collaboration between Seattle Children’s Hospital, the UW and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to explore how technology can empower and engage youth with chronic kidney disease to improve outcomes as they transition to independence .

Adjunct Associate Professor Ari Pollack, Professor Wanda Pratt and Associate Professor Ari Pollack Jaime Snyder received a $672,000 grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for “Kids CoLab — Supporting Collaborative

Fulbright award will make Whiteman’s dream a reality

By Shanzay Shabi

Guatemala is one of the few countries in Latin America that have recently gained strong exposure to the use of information systems and people data processes. Information School Assistant Teaching Professor Heather Whiteman recently received a Fulbright Scholar Award for an idea intended to increase the exposure and understanding of those concepts.

Whiteman, who teaches courses in people analytics and information management at the iSchool, is creating the first master’s-level people analytics program in Latin America at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM) in Guatemala. People analytics is a data-driven approach to studying people processes and improving people-related decisions.

“It’s wonderful to have a dream and then have an organization like Fulbright tell you that your dream is worth an investment,” said Whiteman.

Whiteman’s project was inspired by a professor she met from UFM at a conference. The professor shared with Whiteman her desire to bring more data and analytics to HR in Guatemala, and Whiteman shared

FULBRIGHT, continued on Page 43

iSchool projects win $1.3 million in IMLS funding

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) recently awarded more than $1 .3 million in funding for research projects led by iSchool faculty . They include: Valuing Library and Archives Labor: Assessing Internship and Fellowship Implications for the Library and Archives Community, awarded $318,989, will investigate the impact on librarianship from fellowships and internships focused on diversity, equity and inclusion . The project is led by Assistant Professor Marika Cifor . Empowering Neurodivergent Librarians to Lead Inclusion in Libraries, awarded $491,500, will research libraries’ capacity to support the careers of neurodivergent librarians . The project is led by Associate Professor Hala Annabi and Professor Michelle H . Martin . Open-Source Hardware Assembly, Repair, and Sustainability, awarded $317,332, will investigate the role of documentation in open-source hardware projects . The project is led by Assistant Professor Nicholas Weber . Supporting the Development of Digital Playful Exploratory Resources to Combat Mis/disinformation through Online Intergenerational Co-design, awarded $249,917, will design games in libraries to combat misinformation . The project is led by Associate Professors Jason Yip and Jin Ha Lee and Senior Principal Research Scientist Chris Coward .

People enter into a state of dissociation while using social media, according to a research team led by Assistant Professor Alexis Hiniker . In a paper presented at CHI 2022, the researchers described the total cognitive absorption, diminished self-awareness and reduced sense of agency experienced by users . They proposed interventions that could help people avoid slipping into passive dissociation and wasting time . The lead author on the paper was Amanda Baughan, a doctoral student in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering . Co-authors included Hiniker and iSchool Ph .D . students Anastasia Schaadhardt and Mingrui “Ray” Zhang .

Assistant Professor Tanu Mitra is among the inaugural 17 members of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council . Formed after controversy over podcaster Alexis Joe Rogan’s use of his show to spread Hiniker misinformation about COVID-19, the committee will help the streaming platform set policies over potentially harmful content .