Recent studies have shown that a small number of buildings account for a significant portion of evictions in major U.S. cities, suggesting targeted policy interventions for these hotspots. However, focusing solely on eviction volumes can mislead policymakers by implying that property owners are the primary drivers of high eviction rates. This study investigates the spatial structure of eviction filings at the Census Block Group (CBG) level to determine if high eviction rates are due to neighborhood characteristics or other factors like landlords’ practices. We addressed three research questions: 1) the relationship between eviction filings due to nonpayment of rent and neighborhood characteristics, 2) the differences between eviction filings due to nonpayment and those for other reasons, and 3) the extent to which high rates of eviction filings in certain CBGs can be attributed to neighborhood characteristics versus unexplained spatial effects. We used Restricted Spatial Generalized Linear Mixed Models (RSGLMMs) with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling to estimate neighborhood fixed effects and spatial random effects, using data from Dallas County. Our findings confirm that important neighborhood factors identified in previous studies are consistently significant. Our spatial analysis revealed a noticeable difference between raw eviction filing counts and those adjusted for neighborhood characteristics, identifying CBGs with excessive eviction filings even after accounting for the neighborhood context. Based on these results, we propose a dual-track policy intervention: for hotspot buildings in CBGs with moderate spatial effects, we recommend tenant support measures like rental assistance and legal aid; for those with high spatial effects, we suggest prioritizing in-depth investigations of these buildings and landlord-focused interventions such as education on fair housing laws and landlord-tenant mediation services. All relevant code and data from this project are available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/yilmajung/eviction2024repo.

This study, focusing on two Reddit subcommunities of r/ToastMe and r/RoastMe, aims to (1) characterize and understand users (named Jekyll and Hyde) who simultaneously participate in two subreddits with opposing tones and purposes, (2) build predictive models detecting those Jekyll and Hyde users to assess how unique and idiosyncratic their characteristics are, and (3) investigate their motivations of participation and potential interaction between the two contrasting activities through a survey and one-on-one interviews. Our results reveal that the Jekyll and Hyde users are generally more active and popular than ordinary users. Also, they use assimilated language customized to each community’s tone. Combining these findings with their motivations unveiled through the survey and interviews, we conclude that the Jekyll and Hyde users are digitally culture-savvy, who know how to utilize online community benefits and enjoy each community’s culture by assimilating themselves into the community and observing its rules. Moreover, the users’ duality observed in this process underscores the dynamic and multifaceted nature of online personas. These findings highlight the need for a nuanced approach to understanding online behaviors and provide insights for designing healthier online environments, emphasizing the importance of clear community norms and the potential interplay of users’ activities across different communities.

In recent advancements in sensor and artificial intelligence technologies, the reliability of gesture recognition has significantly improved, prompting various industrial fields to adopt this technology. However, most gesture recognition systems rely on optical methods because of their high accuracy, despite require complex and computationally intensive processes. Moreover, these systems are associated with high construction costs and are susceptible to environmental factors. This paper introduces a novel gesture recognition system, which effectively tracks and estimates gestures using cost-effective ultra-wideband (UWB) sensors and inertial measurement units (IMU). The system acquires position data of gesture through UWB sensors and includes essential data processing steps such as the detection and removal of abnormal data via IMU, data smoothing with a Kalman filter, and data normalization and scaling. Notably, normalization and scaling are achieved by converting the position data into grayscale images, ensuring the consistency of data features and enhancing gesture recognition accuracy across diverse users. The proposed system employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to estimate gestures from these images. Comparative analyses demonstrate that the proposed system exhibits superior gesture classification performance compared to systems utilizing a long-short term memory (LSTM) model and those employing the same CNN model without the aforementioned data processing steps. Therefore, this system is not only cost-effective but also efficiently tracks and estimates gestures, offering significant improvements over existing methods.

The widespread eviction of tenants across the United States has metamorphosed into a challenging public-policy problem. In particular, eviction exacerbates several income-based, educational, and health inequities in society, e.g., eviction disproportionately affects low-income renting families, many of whom belong to underrepresented minority groups. Despite growing interest in understanding and mitigating the eviction crisis, there are several legal and infrastructural obstacles to data acquisition at scale that limit our understanding of the distribution of eviction across the United States. To circumvent existing challenges in data acquisition, we propose WARNER, a novel Machine Learning (ML) framework that predicts eviction filing hotspots in US counties from unlabeled satellite imagery dataset. We account for the lack of labeled training data in this domain by leveraging sociological insights to propose a novel approach to generate probabilistic labels for a subset of an unlabeled dataset of satellite imagery, which is then used to train a neural network model to identify eviction filing hotspots. Our experimental results show that WARNER acheives a higher predictive performance than several strong baselines. Further, the superiority of WARNER can be generalized to different counties across the United States. Our proposed framework has the potential to assist NGOs and policymakers in designing well-informed (data-driven) resource allocation plans to improve the nationwide housing stability. This work is conducted in collaboration with The Child Poverty Action Lab (a leading non-profit leveraging data-driven approaches to inform actions for relieving poverty and relevant problems in Dallas County, TX). The code can be accessed via https://github.com/maryam-tabar/WARNER.

Eviction of tenants has reached a crisis level in the U.S. and its consequences pose significant challenges to society. To tackle this eviction crisis, policymakers have been allocating financial resources but a more efficient resource allocation would need an accurate forecast of the number of tenants at-risk of evictions ahead of time. To help enhance the existing eviction prevention/diversion programs, in this work, we propose a multi-view deep neural network model, named as MARTIAN, that forecasts the number of tenants at-risk of getting formally evicted (at the census tract level) n months into the future. Then, we evaluate MARTIAN’s predictive performance under various conditions using real-world eviction cases filed across Dallas County, TX. The results of empirical evaluation show that MARTIAN outperforms an extensive set of baseline models in terms of predictive performance. Additionally, MARTIAN’s superior predictive performance is generalizable to unseen census tracts, for which no labeled data is available in the training set. This research has been done in collaboration with Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL), which is a pioneering non-governmental organization (NGO) working for tackling poverty-related issues across Dallas County, TX. The usability of MARTIAN is under review by subject matter experts. We release our codebase at https://github.com/maryam-tabar/MARTIAN.