The Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass is excited to announce the recipients of its 2023 Faculty Fellowship Program. This program, launched one year ago, focuses on building public interest-focused interdisciplinary research within the University and to support faculty in developing proposals for external funding.
PIT@UMass is an initiative that was launched in 2021, focused on enhancing and expanding the offerings at UMass Amherst that build social literacy, tech literacy, and the critical thinking needed to promote the public interest in today’s world.
Fellows will receive seed funding to support their projects, all aimed at addressing and potentially solving a complex problem with public interest impacts and reducing social disparities through the responsible and ethical use of information technologies.
The following nine faculty members and their respective projects and teams were selected:
Ali Sarvghad, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS)
Voice-enabled Conversational Journaling for Parkinson’s Disease Patients
Project team: Kara Smith, UMass Chan Medical School; Narges Mahyar, CICS
Ivon Arroyo, CICS
Bilingual Personalized Digital Tutors for Mathematics Learning
Project team: Marialuisa Di Stefano, College of Education; Beverly Woolf, CICS
Yair Zick, CICS
A Computational Perspective on Sequential Fair Allocation Mechanisms
Jess Dillard-Wright, Elaine Marieb College of Nursing (EMCON)
Another Care is Possible: Art, Ethics, and Health Technologies
Project team: Rae Walker and Raeann LeBlanc, EMCON; Kristen Leng, College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) – Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies; Hallie Bahn, HFA – Department of Art
Kelsey Shoub, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) – School of Public Policy
What Counts Count? How Information about Racial Disparities Informs the Public’s Evaluations of District Attorneys
Project team: Jamie Rowen, SBS – Political Science Department; Cindy Xiong, CICS; Youngmin Yi, SBS – Sociology Department
Laurel Smith-Doerr, SBS – Sociology
Auto-mating Race and Gender Inequalities? Analyzing AI design in Automated VehiclesProject team: Shannon Roberts, Computational Social Science Institute – Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Muge Capan, College of Engineering – Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Exploratory Study for the Development of a Social Vulnerability Scoring System to Inform Equitable Maternal and Child Healthcare Resource Allocation in Massachusetts
Project team: Chaitra Gopalappa, Computational Social Science Institute – Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Jessica Boakye, College of Engineering – Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Jeffery Kasper, Department of Art
Animating Family Well-being
Project team: Stephen Boos, MD, UMass Chan Medical School – Baystate, Baystate Family Advocacy Center, Baystate Children’s Hospital Springfield
Song Gao – College of Engineering, – Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Help Gig Workers Learn using Their Own Data
“Our 2023 cohort of Fellows comprises a diverse blend of faculty from across the university, who will be focused on research projects aimed at addressing public interest technology challenges. We look forward to collaborating and supporting them in their work over the upcoming months and are excited to have them become part of our growing campus-wide PIT community,” says Francine Berman, research professor and director of PIT@UMass.
As members of the of the PIT Faculty Fellows community, project teams will meet as a cohort for monthly talks where they can discuss their work, participate in an intensive focused on proposal development by the Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement’s office, and work across campus and the broader PIT network to advance their projects. Learn more.