AI and Detroit’s Census Challenge | Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Type: Public event

AI and Detroit’s Census Challenge

Speaker

Jeffrey Morenoff, Derek Van Berkel

Date & time

Apr 16, 2026, 6:00-7:30 pm EDT

Location

Dana Building, Room 1040
440 Church St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109

The Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society (MIDAS) presents a look at how the use of AI could further complicate the issues affecting Detroit's census count.

Co-sponsored by the School for Environment and Sustainability, Institute for Social Research.

Biography
Dr. Derek Van Berkel is an assistant professor at The School for Environment and Sustainability. His research focuses on understanding land change at diverse scales; the physical and psychological benefit of exposure to natural environments; and how digital visualization of data can add new place-based knowledge in science and community decision-making. He has expertise in spatial statistics, data science, big data, and machine learning. Van Berkel is currently a Co-PI on an NSF grant examining how online webtools can enable the public to co-create landscape designs for novel solutions to climate-change adaptation and mitigation in urban areas. He is also part of the NOAA funded GLISA project developing land change models to support knowledge discovery in municipalities throughout the Great Lake States. His work in AI focuses on deciphering complex sentiment from multimodal content, such as understanding image content and analyzing captions and tags posted by users, at scale. This research aims to provide objective measures of behavior and attitude for modeling diverse values and benefits of nature globally.

Ford School professor Jeffrey D. Morenoff is a professor of sociology, and a research professor at the Institute for Social Research (ISR). He is also director of the ISR Population Studies Center. Professor Morenoff's research interests include neighborhood environments, inequality, crime and criminal justice, the social determinants of health, racial/ethnic/immigrant disparities in health and antisocial behavior, and methods for analyzing multilevel and spatial data.