CAREER: Understanding and addressing geographic inequalities in location-aware technologies

  • Hecht, Brent (PD/PI)

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

Location-aware technologies have become pervasive. We now use location-aware peer economy platforms like Uber and Lyft to get from one place to another. Yelp and Foursquare help us choose where to eat, shop, and have fun. People and many prominent algorithms (e.g. the Google Knowledge Graph) learn about places both foreign and local through geotagged photos, geographic Wikipedia articles, geotagged tweets and other types of volunteered geographic information. Social scientists are using geotagged social media for studies of a character and extent that would have been impossible ten years ago. The list of location-aware technologies that mediate our interactions with the world around us and our understanding of our world is truly massive, and it is expanding at a rapid rate. However, evidence has begun to emerge that location-aware technologies are exacerbating the many demographic barriers that exist across our landscape. For instance, preliminary findings suggest that Uber, TaskRabbit and other location-aware peer economy platforms provide poor neighborhoods with worse service at higher prices (if they even provide service at all). Similarly, there is more and more data in support of the hypothesis that key location-aware algorithms(e.g. location-aware recommender systems and local search systems) are more accurate in areas with certain demographic profiles (e.g. richer areas) than in areas with different profiles. Along the same lines, we and others have established that critical studies that use geographically-referenced social media are likely systematically undercounting disadvantaged populations. The goal of this proposal is to reverse this trend. If successful, this proposal will help ensure that the benefits of location-aware technologies are shared widely, rather being than limited to areas where people of specific demographic profiles live. The space of location-aware technologies is large, and we will focus on two families of high-impact technolo
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date8/1/162/28/23

Funding

  • National Science Foundation (IIS-1707296-003)

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