Offering Practical Solutions to Responsibly Leverage AI
Urban is filling an unmet need in the rapidly developing artificial intelligence (AI) policy space by analyzing how various sectors—including housing, health care, and the child welfare system—use AI and automated systems. Our experts seek to understand the benefits and risks of those uses for all people and communities. Urban is uniquely suited to examine this evolving space because of our deep policy expertise across myriad issues and our technical and data science capabilities. This unparalleled advantage allows Urban to offer leaders strategies for leveraging AI effectively and responsibly.
Learn about our latest AI-related research:
Our research on leveraging automated valuation models (AVMs) to appraise home values helped illuminate inaccuracies and bias in the models. Urban’s findings also contributed to the inclusion of a nondiscrimination standard in a proposed AVM rule.
Urban recreated a model of the underlying criminal and eviction records that tenant screening companies use to make algorithmic recommendations about rental applicants. Urban experts will use these records to understand how specific assumptions and data collection practices affect who gets “screened in” and “screened out” of rental housing.
Urban is examining AI’s role in state Medicaid maternal health services by pairing expert interviews with natural language processing techniques. This approach allows Urban experts to extract and synthesize insights from hundreds of public documents across state agencies nationwide. In late 2025, Urban will publish a report on how managed care providers use AI and automated decisionmaking tools and the implications for pregnant mothers.
Urban researchers are examining how local governments and civil society nonprofit and research organizations apply AI to their internal, policy-focused, and public-facing practices, from synthesizing public meetings minutes to analyzing traffic patterns to streamlining permitting processes.
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