Congratulations to Ruilin Chen!

Ruilin Chen, Ph.D., has been awarded first prize by the National Institute of Justice as part of their "Innovations in Measuring Community Perceptions Challenge". Ruilin's entry proposes to use data from Airbnb property listings and customer reviews, particularly those classified under the "location" subcategory, to assess and quantify levels of fear of crime within communities. 

Ruilin proposes the application of computational methods, with a primary reliance on Large Language Models (LLMs), to extract neighborhood-specific information from the Airbnb dataset. The proposed text analysis process includes text classification, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. Both supervised and unsupervised LLM-based text mining techniques would be used. This proposal illustrates how an existing data set can be used to measure community fear of crime. You can read the announcement and more on the official website of the National Institute of Justice by clicking here.