Below are some helpful materials that might be helpful primers for each of our panels as well as the event as a whole. 

Regulation and Governance of AI at the Local Level

• Machine learning, explained: This MIT Sloan report outlines a high-level overview of what machine learning is and some basic use cases. If you are new to the concept of AI and want to learn a little bit about it, this is one resource to get you started.
• A Policy Maker’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence for State and Local Governments: Reaching Safe, Effective and Equitable Scale: This primer from Carnegie Mellon University Block Center for Technology and Society gives examples of how AI can be used at the state and local level and recommendations that local governments might consider if they are considering implementing these techniques.
• City of San Jose AI & Algorithms Register: The City of San José is leveraging the benefits of AI to improve the delivery of services to residents. As the City increasingly uses AI tools, it is more important than ever to ensure that those AI systems are effective and trustworthy. This document outlines the city’s approach governing this work internally.
• Cook County Assessor’s Office: How are properties valued? The Cook County’s Assessor’s Office is responsible for valuing the more than 1.8 million parcels in Cook County. Illinois law requires that the estimated property value and assessed valuation of your property be periodically updated for real estate tax purposes. This resource explains the challenge of assessing property values, queuing up Nicole Jardine’s team at CCAO to help use machine learning to fix it.

Public Sector Partnerships

• Local Data as an Equity Tool: This brief, from the Urban Institute, outlines three steps to building local data capacity and using data to build racial equity: enhancing data access for community change, building local data infrastructure for responsive services, and using data to amplify community voices through research design, data collection, and dissemination.
• Array of Things: The Array of Things (AoT) is an experimental urban measurement project comprising a network of interactive, modular devices, or “nodes,” that are installed around Chicago to collect real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity. These measurements are published as open data for research and public use. AoT essentially serves as a “fitness tracker” for the city, measuring factors that impact livability in Chicago such as climate, air quality and noise. AoT is notable for its community engagement throughout the project’s design and implementation and for its collaborative partnership with the City of Chicago and community organizations.
• Becoming Good at AI for Good: Based on the experiences of Microsoft’s AI For Good Lab, we detail the different aspects of this type of collaboration broken down into four high-level categories: communication, data, modeling, and impact, and distill eleven takeaways to guide such projects in the future. We briefly describe two case studies to illustrate how some of these takeaways were applied in practice during our past collaborations.

Data Activism

• From Data Literacy to Data Activism: This is an overview of Panelist Kuba Piwowar’s ongoing research portfolio. His project entails the topic of data literacy – a social practice that addresses the understanding and informed use of data. The goal is to make a connection between these two and create a workshop that will empower people to start using data to push social change.
• ChiHackNight: Chi Hack Night is a free, weekly event in Chicago to build, share and learn about tools to create, support, and serve the public good. They are a group of thousands of designers, academic researchers, data journalists, activists, policy wonks, web developers and curious citizens who want to make our city more just, equitable, transparent and delightful to live in through data, design and technology.
• Tracked and Targeted: Policing in Chicago Research Group: The Policing in Chicago Research Group is a collaborative effort of faculty and students at UIC in conversation with social movement organizations to offer research support in service to grassroots campaigns addressing police violence and complex webs of policing in Chicago.
• The European Union GDPR: This document outlines the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is a comprehensive data protection framework enacted by the European Union (EU) to safeguard the privacy and rights of individuals within the European Economic Area (EEA). It imposes strict standards on how organizations handle and process personal data, ensuring transparency, consent, and robust security measures. 

Keynote

• Districtr and Public Mapping: Example of how Moon Duchin’s MGGG Redistricting Lab uses their tool Districtr and integrates community input into the redistricting process.
• Districtr: Districtr is a project of the MGGG Redistricting Lab, intended to promote public participation in redistricting around the United States. Redistricting is dividing up a jurisdiction (like a state, county, or city) into pieces that elect representatives. Where and how the lines are drawn influences everything from who has a shot at getting elected to how resources get allocated.