What else has our team done?

2021: We have completed a prior project with the City of Savannah and Georgia Tech. Our project, A human-in-the-loop machine learning approach to identify vacant, abandoned, and disinvested (VAD) properties in Savannah Georgia, was presented at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Meeting in October 2021. The authors are Xiaofan Liang (GaTech), Clio Andris (GaTech), Brian Brainerd (City of Savannah), and Tara Hicks (City of Savannah). Our team developed a human-in-the-loop machine learning tool for helping the city deal with vacant, abandoned and disinvested (VAD) properties. We worked with Tara Hicks, and municipal employees Alison Goldey, director of the Land Bank Authority, and Denton Hill, of the Legal & Regulatory Affairs Office, to get our system to ‘learn’ from their tacit coding method. As a result, we found that the way properties were classified as VAD differed across the office, and we helped streamline this method. We also learned that tax delinquency was the primary indicator that predicted future structural decay. We will be sharing a preprint of this paper here.