Public Interest Tech @ Cornell Tech - Reflections from the Initiative’s Founder, Fall 2021
by Deborah Estrin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHkpGreKnZ8
Introduction
Since Cornell Tech’s inception the societal and economic impacts of technology have only become more profound; and with that has come a growing desire across our technical community of students, researchers, and practitioners to shape technology to serve public needs.
I was quite intrigued when I first heard the term Public Interest Tech; and when it was time for my Sabbatical in 2019, and with the ‘moral winds’ in my sails of being named a MacArthur fellow, I found the framing both inspiring and grounding. Thanks to seed funding from The Atlantic Philanthropies we were then able to launch an Initiative at Cornell Tech dedicated to Public Interest Tech in Fall of 2020. A few faculty colleagues suggested the appropriately nerdy name of “PiTech”, and that name has stuck.
PiTech at Cornell Tech is dedicated to fostering the next generation of innovators, leaders, and thinkers who will guide technology toward positive societal outcomes.
Some early examples of public ‘minded’ tech
I will start by describing a few projects stretching back over the past 10-15 years that influenced my thoughts about how to weave Public Interest Tech into the work of emerging technologies and technologists.
As a first example, I refer back to a project that we launched around 15 years ago. At that time, programmable mobile devices were becoming pervasive, and we started to pivot some of our wireless sensor network explorations to what we called participatory sensing (this was joint work with many, and in particular Jeff Burke, Mark Hansen, Sasank Reddy and Eric Graham, all at UCLA at the time). We leveraged the phone cameras as sensors and the Mobility and broad observational capabilities of the humans carrying the phones to enable structured observations in what we called at the time Data campaigns. For example:
“Garbage Watch” was created by a student group to lobby for more recycling bins on the campus, and
“What’s Invasive” was built for our local park service for personnel and hikers to record invasive plants on park lands in order to spot and remove them early for the protection of native species.
A third project was used by a neighborhood organization to collect data in support of constructing a youth community center. They recruited high school students to systematically document their own patterns—how they traveled to school, where they went after, where they did homework etc
These examples all leveraged geocoding and cloud based image analysis and GIS like mapping tools for visualization. This was my first engagement with adapting technology to serve a public interest need...including needs that were hyper local and of modest scale, but important to that particular community
Evolving out of the participatory sensing work, I became increasingly focused on a particular application domain of mobile phone based sensing, mobile health. We created then-novel capabilities for individuals to leverage their personal devices to document and measure their health symptoms, side effects, and daily rhythms—as feedback for their doctors to adapt treatment and for the patients themselves to inform self care. Having started out working on Internet protocol development, I thought one way to encourage innovation and impact was to make these patient generated health data available and actionable thru an open standard across providers and conditions, and for patients. So In 2010 Dr Ida Sim and I founded a non profit with funding from RWJF to support the emerging mhealth community. In our Science viewpoint published at the time, We drew the analogy to the great public benefit of initial internet infrastructure and architecture investment that benefitted all players, not just a single company or application. That work and approach continues with The Commons Project in their CommonHealth initiative.
My third example is Nexleaf. Nithya Ramanathan and Martin Lukac met as PhD students in my group at UCLA and as they approached graduation they developed a shared vision of addressing global challenges using available and affordable sensor technology. They founded Nexleaf in 2009 and are still at it, doing great work on a truly global scale from monitoring cook stove pollution to cold chain storage for vaccines.
The last example I want to give is the more recent mission-driven research and impact work of my colleagues Nicki Dell and Tom Ristenpart. Basically this is what happened when an HCI researcher (Nicki) and a Security researcher (Tom) started talking about the overlooked security attacks faced by people who did not have complete control over their own devices. Prior to this, Nicki had studied shared phone use in low resource communities, and Tom had worked on mobile device security vulnerabilities. Together, and considering the unique challenges and trauma faced by victims of Intimate Partner Violence, they developed technical tools and HCI methods to support victims whose phones were being used as vectors of abuse. It resulted both in best paper awards at top conferences and in the implementation of both software and services designed to address the needs of victims...and it eventually led to the founding of CETA- The Clinic to End Tech Abuse. This is an inspiring tech in the public interest story.
Public Interest Tech
Now let me return to Public Interest Tech more broadly. Development of technology to address public needs (as illustrated by these personally proximate examples) is not brand new nor unique. There is a rich history of attention to public needs in tech, including of course your broader, globally-focused ICT4D community. Akin to the earlier Public Interest Law initiatives that emerged decades ago, I believe the term Public Interest Tech was used as early as 2016 but really gained steam around 2018-19 through support from the Ford and New America Foundations.
Bruce Schneier owns the url and the best single resource linking to articles about Public Interest Tech. I applaud his treatment of Public Interest as a broad term.
It reminds me of an early hero of mine from the Internet community Jon Postel who said about protocol design, “Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send”. In this context that encourages being broad in accepting work that wants to label itself part of the community, while not appropriating work that wants to intentionally stand apart.
More recently, Hana Schank and Tara Dawson McGuinness published this book, Power to the Public, bringing together their distinct professional backgrounds and experiences to lay solid foundations for many of us hoping to contribute to technology in service of the public sector and the public good. It is a blueprint for how governments and nonprofits can harness the power of digital technology to solve public problems.
PiTech at Cornell Tech
And now, let me segue to spend the rest of my time focusing on what we are doing to pursue the Public Interest Tech vision at Cornell Tech. Many of the institutions in the New America funded Public Interest Tech University Network are primarily focused on undergrad education. In contrast, We began by considering how to bring a public interest lens to our graduate campus in order to foster the next generation of innovators, leaders and thinkers who will shape technology toward positive societal outcomes.
We launched three new programs in our inaugural year: (1) PiTech Masters studio, (2) Visiting Practitioner's program, and (3) PhD impact Fellows. The details illustrate how we, and hopefully others, might ‘localize’ the implementation of public interest perspectives to best integrate into their institutions
PiTech Studio
Since our start in 2013 Cornell Tech has included a unique Studio program in which all of our Master’s students work on a product development project, in multidisciplinary teams, to address real-world challenges posed by external mentors. When we launched in 2013 we offered just one studio flavor, Startup studio, which of course continues to this day with many improving iterations and many launched startups to its credit.
In 2017 we introduced another lane for students who were planning to live inside established companies and wanted the experience of being intrapreneurs
And last year in 2021 we launched PiTech studio lead by Lyel Resner. The goal of PiTech studio is twofold
To Introduce students to the growing and increasingly important role of technology in social change work ( both as a lever for good and as a potential destructive force to be mitigated), and
To Provide students with concrete tools for launching and scaling technology-based products and organizations intentionally focused on public interest needs. For example, to provide mentoring and insights into financial mechanisms such as public benefit corporations, into foundation and public sector fundraising, and into ethical risk assessment methods.
This academic year PiTech has become a fully integrated part of our studio program, bringing a public lens to Startup and Bigco initiatives as well.
PiTech Visiting Practitioner's Program
This fall we also introduced the Visiting Practitioner's Program, recognizing that while Cornell Tech has always engaged practitioners and mentors in our courses and associated crit sessions, we lacked individuals with deep experience in serving the public interest.
Our inaugural cohort of ViPs are all working to ensure that developments in technology can help lead to a more just and prosperous future for everyone. And we are delighted to have them join the Cornell Tech community as advisors and collaborators, and to support them in their own cutting edge work. You’ll notice we intentionally brought individuals working at this problem from very different angles, sectors, and in very different roles. From Roxann Stafford reimagining healthy media ecosystems, to Rhonda Allen bringing social and racial justice to the heart of Sillicon valley, to Anjana Rajan using cutting edge cryptography methods to combat human trafficking and white supremacy terrorism, and Oscar Romero pursuing inclusive innovation strategies in the NYC Mayor’s office.
PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship
Our third program, is the PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship designed to give PhD students in technical fields a structured opportunity to apply their technical expertise to societal needs.
For context, Most doctoral students in technical fields already do at least one summer internship with a tech company; which is an important experience that we don't want to replace, but we do hope to augment. So we created this “alternative option” that curates PiTech experiences and matches and funds PhD students to participate. We took this approach because in talking with our students, they pointed to not knowing where to start or how to choose a problem or partner as a key impediment to acting on their desires to commit time and learn more.
Our PiTech Impact Fellowship embeds PhD students from technical disciplines within non-profit and public sector organizations based in New York. The fellowship provides an opportunity for these students to develop and apply their expertise on behalf of the public interest and in a real-world context. PiTech Fellows work on a specific project that advances the organization’s mission, applying their skills in areas such as: data analysis and machine learning, AI ethics/fairness, user-centered design, privacy and security, and emerging technologies broadly.
Matt Stempeck, formerly at Civic Hall and MSR, collaborated to bring the program to life and we recruited a first cohort of students and hosting orgs for this past summer of 2021.
Our inaugural PhD Impact Fellow placements included: Yiqing with The Anti-Defamation League: Center on Extremism, Ilan with Consumer Reports Digital Lab, Briana with Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood Foundation, and Zhao working with NYC Coler Hospital.
In preparation for our second cohort planned for summer 22, Matt has led the curation of a rich portfolio of NYC and NYS based host organizations addressing a range of public concerns from Protecting our Information ecosystems, to Social justice matters, Sustainability goals, and Public Health and Services delivery.
As we scale (and funding dependent), we hope to host growing annual cohorts of doctoral interns from around the country, as well as eventually postdoctoral fellows, and faculty sabbaticals, in order to foster the interdisciplinary and community-engaged work that will shape technical innovation to address diverse societal needs. We welcome collaborators who would like to adopt/iterate/improve on this concept and work together to expand and extend the spirit of the PIT University network.
Conclusion
The last few years has made clear to many the very mixed role that technology — and specifically digital technology — has played in both enabling and exacerbating, as well as alleviating many of the global challenges we all face. Clearly Higher Education must honestly confront the role it has played in educating individuals who have been wittingly or unwittingly parties to these changes, and begin to make holistic changes ourselves.
Specifically, we must re-examine the learning opportunities we create for our students, and how we teach and model creation of new technology and technology-driven companies.
To that end, PiTech@Cornell Tech is promoting non-profit and public sector models, AND along with the Digital Life Initiative we are integrating a public interest lens across the core of our technology education and research, by intentionally and rigorously considering the societal opportunities and impacts of new technologies and ventures.