Dean, School of Government; Professor of Public Law and Government; Executive Director, School of Government Foundation Board of Directors, UNC-Chapel Hill
Public health surveillance systems routinely process massive volumes of data to identify health adverse events affecting the general population. Surveillance and response to foodborne disease suffers from a number of systemic and other delays that hinder early detection and confirmation of emerging contamination situations. In this paper we develop an answer set programming (ASP) application to assist public health officials in detecting an emerging foodborne disease outbreak by integrating and analyzing in near real-time temporally, spatially and symptomatically diverse data. These data can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting systems from regulatory agencies. We encode geographic ontologies in ASP to infer spatial relationships that may not be evident using traditional statistical tools. These technologies and ontologies have been implemented in a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis Tool (NCFEDA). The application was built to demonstrate the potential of situational awareness—created through real-time data fusion, analytics, visualization, and real-time communication—to reduce latency of response to foodborne disease outbreaks by North Carolina public health personnel.
We present preliminary work to construct a knowledge curation system to advance research in the study of regional economics. The proposed system exploits natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically implement business event extraction, provides a user-facing interface to assist human curators, and a feedback loop to improve the performance of the Information Extraction Model for the automated parts of the system.
Federal, state and local governments acted quickly to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, because the category of “small business” is defined so broadly, stimulus money did not always reach the intended recipients. The government’s definition of small business includes firms with fewer than 500 employees — which, taken together, represent a broad collection of different types of businesses with very different needs.
On Jan. 18, members of the Kenan Scholars program met up on a sunny afternoon to assist in building senior housing with Habitat for Humanity of Orange County. In support of affordable housing, scholars suited up in gloves and goggles to prep and install windows and shower stalls.
...please read our statement here: https://kenaninstitute.unc.edu/about/kenan-institute-statement-on-diversity-equity-inclusion/ The aim of the program is to assist in funding pilot research projects or promising research that is not a candidate for typical funding...
Join us for an afternoon with Dr. Mandy Cohen, N.C. secretary of health and human services. Among her top priorities are combating the opioid crisis; building a strong, efficient Medicaid program; and improving early childhood education.
This paper studies an upstream supplier who quotes prices for a key component to multiple sellers that compete for an end-buyer's indivisible contract. At most one of the supplier's quotes may result in downstream contracting and hence produce revenue for her.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond – in partnership with the USDA and the SBA – will hold a workshop for Rural Business Investment Companies (RBICs), Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs), and banks.
“A storm is threat’ning….Gimme, gimme shelter.” The words of Mick Jagger were probably on the minds of many at the 2018 UNC Real Estate Research Symposium on October 11-12. As the remnants of Hurricane Michael came crashing through the Raleigh-Durham area, participants battled flight delays, cancellations and power outages to get to the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill.
On Oct. 12, Kenan Scholars Chris Karras, Emily Arnold, Victor Brown and Jack Noble presented the work they completed during their public sector summer internships at the Kenan Institute Asia in Bangkok, Thailand.
On April 25, the Kenan Institute presented UNC students Alex Cooper and Phillippa Owens with the institute’s two highest honors. Cooper received the Rollie Tillman Jr. Outstanding Leadership Award, and Owens was recognized with the Kenan Institute Impact Award. Both awards honor students have made a significant impact on the Kenan Institute and its initiatives and exhibited leadership at UNC and in the broader community.
In his most recent paper James H. Johnson, director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, addresses the challenges facing senior African Americans in accessing long-term care.
Founders often face a fundamental tension. On one hand, founders usually desire to retain as much control over their firm as possible. On the other hand, they often lack the competencies required to lead their companies through later stages of growth. But do founders actually listen to these team members? Or do they just continue to listen to their own intuition?
Ted Zoller received one of the highest honors at the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers at their annual conference on Saturday, Sept. 28, in Stockholm, Sweden.
Unemployment insurance has been a lifeline for millions of Americans who have found themselves out of work in the wake of the economic shutdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. But with federal, state and local government coffers strained, the time has come for short-time compensation (STC) and partial unemployment insurance programs to receive a closer look. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how these little-known initiatives can benefit both employees and employers and provide relief to an ailing U.S. economy.
In recent months, mechanisms that have allowed for high-skilled foreign nationals to study and work in the U.S. have been put on the policy chopping block. In this Kenan Insight, we discuss why high-skilled foreign workers are critical to America's economic health, and why policies must continue to support their entry into the U.S.