News

Are you a UMass Amherst faculty member with a research project idea that addresses public interest technology challenges while also reducing societal disparities? If so, we want to hear from you. February 1 is the submission deadline for PIT@UMass’ 2023 Faculty Fellowship Program.Approximately 7-11 Fellowships will be awarded in late February, with three of them being sponsored by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS), Manning College of Information and Computer Science and Marieb College (CICS) of Nursing.The Fellowships, with the exception of the three sponsored awards, can relate to various areas. The three sponsored Fellowships will be expected to focus on activities specifically related to SBS, CICS or Nursing. Proposals can be in the amount between $5K-$8K. They can also complement existing funding from other UMass departments, schools, or colleges to incorporate public…

The paper titled “Role of Social Media in Social Protest Cycles: A Sociomaterial Examination,” written by Monideepa Tarafdar, Isenberg’s Charles J. Dockendorff Endowed Professor and PhD coordinator in information systems, and Deepa Kajal Ray, a data scientist with HSBC, was named winner of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) College of Senior Scholars Best Papers Award during the International Conference on Information Systems in Copenhagen in December. The paper was also named runner-up for best paper published in 2021 in the journal Information Systems Research. The work analyzed how, after a fatal gang rape in Delhi, a social media-led protest engulfed India and led to dramatic change. According to Tarafdar, the series of events provide a prototype for how protest cycles occur today. Read more.   Envelope

As a Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) member institution, UMass Amherst faculty and scholars are eligible to apply for a seat in a Wiki Scholars course focused on bolstering the availability and accuracy of information about public interest technology on Wikipedia. Selected participants will gain training on how to contribute content to Wikipedia and collaborate weekly over 6 weeks to create a public interest technology Wikipedia article and incorporate content into other relevant pages. Participants may work on content related to artificial intelligence, data privacy, criminal justice, climate justice, equity justice, critical structure access, or other topics. Learn more and apply.Questions can also be sent to PIT@UMass or to PIT-UN. Envelope

In the second edition of Tech in the News which took place during the first week of December, PIT@UMass started an interesting conversation about rethinking social media.  Moderated by Dr. Francine Berman, the conversation focused on two pivotal platforms - TikTok and Twitter.The session kicked off with Professor Hamed Zamani presenting his perspective on why TikTok is so addictive and providing a breakdown of the underlying factors that have contributed to the growing popularity of the app - the interactive, dynamic user interface and the behavior tracking algorithms that match content to user interest and its impact on industrializing virality.This was followed by a stirring talk by Professor Ethan Zuckerman tracing the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. He stressed on the importance of the platform in terms of its text-based content, asymmetricfollower-following network. Zuckerman also stated…

With the theme “Tackling Climate-Induced Challenges with AI”, the Convergence Research (CORE) Institute, funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator recently announced a collaborative convergence training program to address climate-related issues. The CORE Institute or Convergence Research Institute, part of the Convergence Accelerator’s Track D: AI-Driven Data Sharing and Modeling, provides graduate student, early-career and mid-career researchers and practitioners with the opportunity to gain convergent skills to identify use-inspired solutions to societal challenges through a six-week training program. The program is open to applicants from the public and private sectors as well as from academia and from nonprofit and non-governmental organizations, including AI experts, climate scientists, legislators and staffers, public policy professionals, climate activists, and researchers. Applicants can be in career phases ranging from graduate students to early and mid-career professionals. The Institute is receiving applications…

Featured on the New America website, this article details the work of Carl Meyer, an information technology professional and the executive director of ShiftIT, a nonprofit organization located in Blantyre, Malawi, and Charlies Schweik, Associate Director of PIT@UMass and Professor, who together, launched the World Librarians program, a model for connecting requests for information from students in under-resourced countries with publicly available, open educational resources.  This amazing story details the successful six-year path of their work, including the rollout of over 30 rural school deployments in Malawi, expansion into Kenya, and overall broadening of availability of resources.  According to Schweik, “What is remarkable about this project is that it shows just how small the world has become, and how technology coupled with social ingenuity can create systems where people on two sides of the world who have…