Interview with Fanglan Chen: Exploring tradeoffs in automated school redistricting

Fanglan Chen, Subhodip Biswas, Zhiqian Chen, Shuo Lei, Naren Ramakrishnan and Chang-Tien Lu presented work at AAAI 2023 on exploring the feasibility of automatically generating school redistricting plans. In this interview, Fanglan tells us more about this work, the difficult balancing act when drafting such plans, their methodology, and results of a case study that they carried out. Our paper explores the feasibility of automatically generating school redistricting plans in an efficient manner and addressing tradeoffs in balancing different criteria in the process. The goal of this research is to assist school board members and urban planners in drafting qualitatively different redistricting plans that represent a variety of considerations in decision making and facilitating better utilization of educational resources. To accommodate the changes to current student enrolment numbers or projections, the school attendance zones need to be assessed and redrawn each year.