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Addressing strategies for managing vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties is important for maintaining healthy communities. Yet, the process of identifying these properties can be difficult. Here, we create a human-in-the-loop machine learning (HITLML) model called VADecide and apply it to a parcel-level case study in Savannah, Georgia. The results show a higher prediction accuracy than was achieved when using a machine learning model without human input in the training. The HITLML approach also reveals differences between machine vs. human-generated results. Our findings contribute to knowledge about the advantages and challenges of HITLML in urban planning. [Accepted for Publication at a Peer Review Journal]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of data visualizations were created to inform the public about the rapidly evolving crisis. Data dashboards, a form of information dissemination used during the pandemic, have facilitated this process by visualizing statistics regarding the number of COVID-19 cases over time. In this research, we conducted a qualitative interview study among dashboard creators from federal agencies, state health departments, mainstream news media outlets, and other organizations that created (often widely-used) COVID-19 dashboards to answer the following questions: how did visualization creators engage in COVID-19 dashboard design, and what tensions, conflicts, and challenges arose during this process? Our findings detail the trajectory of design practices -- from creation to expansion, maintenance, and termination -- that are shaped by the complex interplay between design goals, tools and technologies, labor, emerging crisis contexts, and public engagement. We particularly examined the tensions between designers and the general public involved in these processes. These conflicts, which often materialized due to a divergence between public demands and standing policies, centered around the type and amount of information to be visualized, how public perceptions shape and are shaped by visualization design, and the strategies utilized to deal with (potential) misinterpretations and misuse of visualizations. Our findings and lessons learned shed light on new ways of thinking in visualization design, focusing on the bundled activities that are invariably involved in human and nonhuman participation throughout the entire trajectory of design practice., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

Moving window and hot spot detection analyses are statistical methods used to analyze point patterns within a given area. Such methods have been used to successfully detect clusters of point events such as car thefts or incidences of cancer. Yet, these methods do not account for the connections between individual events, such as social ties within a neighborhood. This paper presents two GIS methods, EdgeScan and NDScan, for capturing areas with high and low levels of local social connections. Both methods are moving window processes that count the number of edges and network density, respectively, in a given focal area (window area). The focal window attaches resultant EdgeScan and NDScan statistics to nodes at the center of the focal window area. We implement these methods on a case study of 1960s connections between members of the Mafia in New York City. We use various definitions of a focal neighborhood including Euclidean, Manhattan and K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) definitions. We find that KNN tends to overstate the values of local networks, and that there is more variation in outcome values for nodes on the periphery of the study area. We find that, location-wise, EdgeScan and NDScan hot spots differ from traditional spatial hot spots in the study area. These methods can be extended to future studies that detect local triads and motifs, which can capture the local network structure in more detail.