Dear Applied Statistics Workshop Community,
Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, February 7 (12:00 EST). Elisabeth
Paulson presents "Improving Refugee Resettlement Outcomes with Optimization.
"
<When>
February 7, 12:00 to 1:30 PM, EST
Lunch will be available for pick-up inside CGIS K354.
<Where>
In-person: CGIS K354
Zoom:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/93217566507?pwd=elBwYjRJcWhlVE5teE1VNDZoUXdjQT09
<Abstract>
Every year, tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers are resettled
in host countries across the world. In many host countries, newcomers are
assigned to a specific locality (e.g., city) upon arrival by a resettlement
agency. This assignment decision has a profound long-term impact on
integration outcomes. The high-level goal of this line of work is to
improve these outcomes through prediction and optimization algorithms.
We will describe two new dynamic assignment algorithms to dynamically match
refugees and asylum seekers to geographic localities within a host country.
The first---currently implemented in a multi-year pilot in
Switzerland---achieves near-optimal expected employment (and improves upon
the status quo procedure by about 40%). However, it can result in an
imbalanced allocation to the localities over time, which creates
undesirable workload inefficiencies for resettlement agencies. To address
this problem, the second algorithm—currently being deployed in the
US—balances the goal of improving outcomes with the desire for a balanced
allocation over time. We will also discuss extensions of these methods that
improve predictive performance in the face of non-stationarity, and enhance
robustness and fairness across demographic groups.
<2023-2024 Schedule>
GOV 3009 Website:
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009
Calendar:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=Y18zdjkzcGF2OWZqa2tsZHJidTlzbm…
Best,
Jialu
--
Jialu Li
Department of Government
Harvard University
jialu_li(a)g.harvard.edu