VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Gaurab Pokharel
dblp:340/4219
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2024
—ORCID · unresolved
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
1 paper |
Computational social science and digital humanities · 100% | |
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
1 paper |
Data mining · 100% |
Topics — the 2 heaviest of 2, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Computational social science and digital humanities
public administration |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning · AAAI 2024 |
Data mining › predictive modeling › classification
decision tree learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning · AAAI 2024 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
machine learning · 1.5decision tree · 1.5
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine LearningabstractStreet-level bureaucrats interact directly with people on behalf of government agencies to perform a wide range of functions, including, for example, administering social services and policing. A key feature of street-level bureaucracy is that the civil servants, while tasked with implementing agency policy, are also granted significant discretion in how they choose to apply that policy in individual cases. Using that discretion could be beneficial, as it allows for exceptions to policies based on human interactions and evaluations, but it could also allow biases and inequities to seep into important domains of societal resource allocation. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to understand street-level bureaucrats' behavior. We leverage a rich dataset that combines demographic and other information on households with information on which homelessness interventions they were assigned during a period when assignments were not formulaic. We find that caseworker decisions in this time are highly predictable overall, and some, but not all of this predictivity can be captured by simple decision rules. We theorize that the decisions not captured by the simple decision rules can be considered applications of caseworker discretion. These discretionary decisions are far from random in both the characteristics of such households and in terms of the outcomes of the decisions. Caseworkers typically only apply discretion to households that would be considered less vulnerable. When they do apply discretion to assign households to more intensive interventions, the marginal benefits to those households are significantly higher than would be expected if the households were chosen at random; there is no similar reduction in marginal benefit to households that are discretionarily allocated less intensive interventions, suggesting that caseworkers are using their knowledge and experience to improve outcomes for households experiencing homelessness. Gaurab Pokharel, Sanmay Das, Patrick J. Fowler |
AAAI | 1 |