Professor Gabriel Scheffler and Law & Technology Fellow Or Cohen-Sasson recently received a $20,000 grant from The Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing for their research project “Regulating Inequality: A Data-Driven Analysis Through Five Decades of Federal Rulemaking.”
“The research project is in its early stages, but the basic idea is to study how — and to what extent — agencies take distributional considerations (i.e., how costs and benefits are distributed across different groups) into account during the federal rulemaking process,” said Scheffler, who works primarily in the areas of health law and policy, administrative law, and regulatory policy.
"We'll be applying cutting-edge data science and AI techniques to analyze over 150,000 federal regulations published over five decades,” said Cohen-Sasson. “By harnessing big data, AI, and legal analysis, we aim to systematically track how agencies' attention to distributional impacts has evolved over time and across different policy areas. IDSC's support will help us develop robust computational tools to carry out this research effectively."
Now in its fourth year, the IDSC grants program helps increase the use of data science to foster breakthroughs in disciplinary pursuits, making the research team more competitive for external funding. In terms of this grant opportunity, data science was defined as utilizing state-of-the-art approaches such as Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence to enable scientific discovery that is data driven.
Projects will include at least one data scientist from IDSC and one researcher from a specific discipline. Typically, the disciplinary researcher initiates and leads the project. The IDSC data scientist acts as a mentor/high-level consultant to ensure the proposal has enough data science.
The awards include $20,000 in discretionary funds.
Professor Andres Sawicki, director of the Business of Innovation, Law & Technology Concentration, and co-director of the IDSC Data Ethics + Society, will mentor this project. According to Sawicki, the grant will allow Scheffler and Cohen-Sasson, who directs the Miami Law & AI Lab, to use ML techniques to study a huge dataset of federal regulations.
