arXiv subjects

Mohsen Ghasemizade

Publications and source records attributed to Mohsen Ghasemizade.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Making Local Government Contracts Legible: A Computational Pipeline for Classifying and Mapping Intergovernmental Service Agreements

Interlocal agreements are one of the primary instruments through which local governments formalize collaboration for public service delivery, yet the institutional and financial content encoded in these contracts has remained inaccessible to systematic analysis at scale. This paper introduces an end-to-end computational pipeline for classifying intergovernmental agreements by institutional form and extracting financial relationships between principals and agents in service contracts. Applied to Iowa's 28E archive (N = 21,629), the largest dataset of interlocal agreements in the United States, the pipeline combines LLM-based summarization and classification across LLaMA 3.1, GPT 5.2 Pro, and Gemini 3 Pro on a four-class classification task that distinguishes agreements as either service contracts, resource sharing agreements, joint operations agreements, or new joint entity agreements. We also identify the financial principal and agent in these agreements and contracts, as well as the resulting dollar amounts and represent them on a directed network. The resulting financial network is organized around a small number of dominant service providers, with counties serving as the most structurally versatile actors, and cities as predominantly principals. By rendering the content of Iowa interlocal agreements analyzable at scale for the first time, this pipeline establishes a reusable methodology that researchers and state agencies can apply to track how public dollars move across local governments and to identify entities that depend heavily on a small number of providers.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences

Privacy preferences are not fixed individual traits, they depend on context and lived experiences. In this study, we analyze 2,912 survey responses from 782 college students collected over seven survey periods during 2023 and 2024. We ask about their usage of social media, the security settings of their accounts, and measure their comfort in sharing personally identifiable information (PII) across 17 different institutional contexts. Compared to past research, we observe a large shift towards private accounts, going from 1/3rd private in 2007 to 2/3rds in 2024, and find that participants' discomfort sharing PII with social media platforms strongly predicts their privacy settings. Beyond social media, we identify a stable ranking of institutional trust, though some institutions, like the police, show high variability reflecting divergent lived experiences. Traditionally marginalized groups and participants having faced adverse childhood experiences show more discomfort with institutions of power, especially in areas where they face greater vulnerability. We argue for context-adaptive privacy settings that recognize institutional relationships and demographic vulnerabilities, moving beyond one-size-fits-all consent frameworks toward contextually appropriate data governance.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Aim High, Stay Private: Differentially Private Synthetic Data Enables Public Release of Behavioral Health Information with High Utility

Sharing health and behavioral data raises significant privacy concerns, as conventional de-identification methods are susceptible to privacy attacks. Differential Privacy (DP) provides formal guarantees against re-identification risks, but practical implementation necessitates balancing privacy protection and the utility of data. We demonstrate the use of DP to protect individuals in a real behavioral health study, while making the data publicly available and retaining high utility for downstream users of the data. We use the Adaptive Iterative Mechanism (AIM) to generate DP synthetic data for Phase 1 of the Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study (LEMURS). The LEMURS dataset comprises physiological measurements from wearable devices (Oura rings) and self-reported survey data from first-year college students. We evaluate the synthetic datasets across a range of privacy budgets, epsilon = 1 to 100, focusing on the trade-off between privacy and utility. We evaluate the utility of the synthetic data using a framework informed by actual uses of the LEMURS dataset. Our evaluation identifies the trade-off between privacy and utility across synthetic datasets generated with different privacy budgets. We find that synthetic data sets with epsilon = 5 preserve adequate predictive utility while significantly mitigating privacy risks. Our methodology establishes a reproducible framework for evaluating the practical impacts of epsilon on generating private synthetic datasets with numerous attributes and records, contributing to informed decision-making in data sharing practices.

cs.CR↗