News

The Responsible Technology Coalition (RTC), a new UMass Amherst graduate student organization, and the Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass (PIT@UMass), welcomed Julia Angwin this past month in a candid and compelling conversation about data, journalism and the Internet.  Julia is a Pulitzer-prize winner and founder and editor-in-chief of the Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society. Created with the goal of furthering collaboration between technologists and journalists, the Markup integrates computation, data collection, statistical analysis, and automation in its journalistic activities.   Facilitated by Ethan Zuckerman (UMass Associate Professor and PIT@UMass Co-founder and Research Director), Julia shared approaches she uses in many of her investigations and addressed the effectiveness of technical literacy and partnerships between technologists, domain experts and journalists.  Additional topics covered include public media…

Congratulations to UMass faculty Charlie Schweik and Brenda Bushouse and UMass Postdoc Curtis Atkisson on being awarded a roughly $2M grant renewal from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Growing Convergence Research program for their project, “Jumpstarting Successful Open-Source Software Projects with Evidence-based Rules and Structures.” The Growing Convergence Research program Is one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas, recognizing the grand challenges found in today’s world will not be solved by single disciplines and requires “the merging of ideas, approaches and technologies from widely diverse fields of knowledge to stimulate innovation and discovery.” This merging of disciplines is evident with the team structure of this project, which combines individuals from both UMass and the University of California (UC) Davis. Schweik is the Associate Director of PIT@UMass and Professor of Environmental Conservation and Public Policy, and a…

Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder and associate director of the Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass will present the closing keynote at Stanford University’s Trust and Safety Research Conference.  The event, hosted by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Trust and Safety Foundation, begins on September 29 and will feature two days of dynamic talks, workshops, and networking events that addresses topics including but not limited to community governance and moderation.  Learn more.     

On September 19, PIT Director and PIT@UMass co-founder Dr. Francine Berman will speak at a meeting hosted by the Institute of Diversity Sciences (IDS) Learning Research Group on activities taking place within the PIT@UMass Initiative.  This IDS meeting will be focused on the theme of disparity, diversity, and equity in learning, and Dr. Berman will provide insight to other departments on how the PIT initiative is making progress in those areas and offer opportunities for collaboration.  For more information on UMass@PIT and how you can become involved, contact pit@umass.edu.  

The presence of new digital technologies is expanding in professional planning practice and in everyday urban life. Rather than examine the technical capabilities or institutional structures of such tools, this talk draws attention to the personal and collective desires that animate them, in particular the desires for certainty and solvability. Examples from recent research on New Mobility—a suite of smartphone apps, data infrastructures, and novel transportation services—suggest that when digital technologies promises an idealized escape from the challenges of politics and infrastructure, they risk leaving us unprepared to live well with the inevitable messiness of urban life.Speaker: Peter Dunn | Lecturer, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional PlanningDate: Thursday, September 15, 2022Location: Design Building Rm. 170Time: 4:00 - 5:00 pm ESTPeter Dunn is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of…

A number of high-profile whistleblowers in the technology industry have stepped into the spotlight in the past few years. For the most part, they have been revealing corporate practices that thwart the public interest: Frances Haugen exposed personal data exploitation at Meta, Timnit Gebru and Rebecca Rivers challenged Google on ethics and AI issues, and Janneke Parrish raised concerns about a discriminatory work culture at Apple, among others. Many of these whistleblowers are women – far more, it appears, than the proportion of women working in the tech industry. This raises the question of whether women are more likely to be whistleblowers in the tech field. The short answer is: “It’s complicated.” For many, whistleblowing is a last resort to get society to address problems that can’t be resolved within an organization, or at least by the whistleblower. It speaks to…