Charlotte Alexander (’06), Professor of Law and Ethics at Georgia Institute of Technology, Scheller College of Business, was quoted on Georgia Tech’s website announcing the university’s new Law, Data, and Design Lab, which she leads in harnessing the power of technology to improve justice systems around the world (“New Law, Data, and Design Lab Uses Innovation to Increase Justice System Access, Efficiency, and Fairness,” Jun. 27). “The justice system touches almost all aspects of society and the economy, but court proceedings are often seen as slow, inefficient, costly, unpredictable, and unfair. Our work in the Lab uses tools and methods from across disciplines—from business to computer science to public policy and more—to build data- and design-focused solutions to justice problems,” Charlotte said. “For example, a team of operations researchers and I are adapting an AI-powered simulation tool used in hospital emergency rooms for modeling patient flows and wait times to tackle court delays. We first turned the text of court records into analyzable case event logs, and then fed the data into the simulation tool, which allows us to test the impact of changes in court staffing or procedure on case processing time and other metrics.”
