Embedded Files
Interviews with Faculty
Interviews with Faculty
"We need to consider the person that will use the technology. And in that sense it [technological development] always has this public interest technology focus."
Shannon Roberts, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, & 2023 PIT@UMass Fellow
Dr. Shannon Roberts is a trained Human Factors engineer with expertise in studying and evaluating the interaction between humans and systems within the domain of transportation safety, with a particular interest in human’s adaptation to automated vehicles, including both the positive and negative impacts. For her PIT@UMass project, Dr. Roberts is working with an interdisciplinary team to work with truck drivers in order to help illuminate their thoughts and opinions on how self-driving technology can and will impact their livelihoods. She hopes to leverage this data to assist researchers in considering all voices during the development of this technology. (Personal Website)
".... this topic of automation and transportation is trying to solve problems. While it's solving some problems, it’s also creating new problems and so we're trying to look at the balance of those things together with our different perspectives."
"It's not just about individual people's decisions, but how these systems get created and take on lives of their own."
Laurel Smith-Doerr, Department of Sociology, Principal Investigator for UMass ADVANCE, former Inaugural Director of the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR), & 2023 PIT@UMass Fellow
Dr. Laurel Smith-Doerr is a professor in the Department of Sociology and investigates how science, gender, and organizations are connected and become institutionalized in contemporary knowledge-based communities. She has a particular interest in studying gendered and racialized inequalities in socio technical systems and the organizations that produce them. For her PIT@UMass project, Professor Smith-Doerr is working with an interdisciplinary team to conduct community-engaged research with stakeholders about the development of automated vehicles in order to support equitable decision-making and design. (Personal Website)
"There's a lot of discussion about regulation of AI right now but I don't think there's as much of the kind of interdisciplinary data that we are collecting in this project… I'm hoping that we'll be able to have informed conversations about the elements we need to be thinking about in decision making around socio-technical systems."
"As a planner, we do the things that create the background of everybody's everyday lives. This [planning] has always been a domain where public interest is not an afterthought."
Henry Renski, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, Director of the Center for Economic Development (CED)
Dr. Henry Renski is a professor of Regional Planning and investigates how technological and social forces drive regional economic competitiveness and transformation, and builds upon this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of economic development policy. Dr. Renski is working with a team of interdisciplinary researchers through PIT@UMass on a project that seeks to quantify how the rise of self-driving technology will change the way people live and work in their day to day lives. Through this work, Dr. Renski hopes to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the impact of technological change through respectfully engaging with the impacted groups using community-driven data collection techniques. (Personal Website)
"I personally feel that within my discipline there's a lot of planning and discussion around very important topics like climate change or things like that, but very few of us actually talk about technological change. The automation of driving in particular is going to change the way that people live and work."
"I'm definitely very critical of our over-excitement about specific tools, and I think we need to look at our field from a social context."
Jeffery Kasper, Department of Art, Undergraduate Program Director, & 2023 PIT@UMass Fellow
Titled “Animating Family Well-being,” Kasper’s project brings together a design team of undergraduate and graduate UMass students, physicians from Baystate Medical Center, Springfield-area parents, and educators to create a series of bilingual animated videos which will provide information about early childhood development. Initiated by Stephen Boos, MD, this project uses a community-engaged research and design process to develop a series of motion comics that communicate practices crafted by parents and grounded in science. (Personal Website)
"We could start animating these characters really quickly. That part is fast, but the process of working with the community is slow… If we really want to foreground the public interest part…and build projects that are coming from the public, that requires a different kind of time."
"I think I was sort of always sensitized to care about how knowledge, and particularly technological knowledge and awareness of technology, separates and constrains access."
Michelle Trim, College of Information & Computer Sciences, Informatics Program Director, and Recipient of 2022 New America-PIT-UN Challenge Grant
This project supports the design and implementation of an informatics data science course co-located and integrated with the curriculum of the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Field School, Italy. Emphasizing cultural awareness and social responsibility, this project brings together a project team in developing a study abroad data science course that expands the data literacy skills of humanities majors while providing experience in applied research in the humanities for informatics majors. This project is a collaboration between Michelle Trim in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and Anthony Tuck in the College of Humanities & Fine Arts. (Personal Website)
"I'm committed to continuing to foster in students a sense of responsibility and awareness when it comes to doing data analysis work that has implications for a municipality or public body beyond the technologist running the analysis."
"I've always been of the opinion that I don't own any of this material, I don't own this information—I'm just the custodian of it."
Anthony Tuck, Classics Department & Recipient of 2022 New America-PIT-UN Challenge Grant
Professor Tuck’s project supports the design and implementation of an informatics data science course co-located and integrated with the curriculum of the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Field School, Italy. Emphasizing cultural awareness and social responsibility, this project brings together a project team in developing a study abroad data science course that expands the data literacy skills of humanities majors while providing experience in applied research in the humanities for informatics majors. This project is a collaboration between Michelle Trim in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and Anthony Tuck in the College of Humanities & Fine Arts. (Personal Website)
"An archaeological excavation is a data engine… Responsible archaeological projects are ones that don't just generate significant amounts of data, but also transform that data into meaningful, interpretable narratives."
"This course shows that we can actually use entrepreneurship tools to help solve social problems that society needs to solve, helping students go from idea to reality."
Bogdan Prokopovych, Isenberg School of Management & 2022 PIT@UMass Fellow
Dr. Prokopovych is a Senior Lecturer in the Management Department at the Isenberg School of Management who’s teaching and research focus on how organizations can contribute to society’s sustainability and create social impact. He is also a Social Entrepreneurship Coordinator at ISOM. Dr. Prokopovych was funded through PIT@UMass to develop a course on social entrepreneurship. Through this course, Dr. Prokopovych seeks to equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary to take existing business strategies and quantify the social-impact of social-entrepreneurship problems in order to identify and create business opportunities that have positive social impact. (Personal Website)
"Even though we may represent different disciplines, but, at the same time, we serve a common mission. We are just approaching it from different angles. Having PIT as a platform was attractive to me, as someone who is teaching at Isenberg, as it made me appreciate things that I didn't know before and hopefully has helped my PIT colleagues learn about some of the things related to social entrepreneurship that we do in Isenberg."
"I have always looked at the Internet as something that can make the world a bigger and wider place… It's made Global Voices possible. I think about the potential for the Internet… and the fact that it doesn't always work that way."
Ethan Zuckerman, School of Public Policy, Department of Communication, and College of Information & Computer Sciences, & Director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
In 2005, Zuckerman co-founded Global Voices, which showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages. Global Voices is an international, multilingual community of writers, translators, and human rights activists. The network leverages the power of the internet to tell stories that build understanding across borders by supporting original reporting, translating stories into dozens of languages, defending free speech online, and providing training and mentorship to local contributors. Global Voices celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2024. (Personal Website)
"Have we found the right way to talk about this [Public Interest Technology] yet? … How do you make sure that the public has a seat at the table in these discussions?"
"I try to lower the access to technology and make it more available to a wider range of audiences."
Ali Sarvghad, College of Information & Computer Sciences & 2023 PIT@UMass Fellow
Dr. Ali Sarvghad’s research investigates novel visualization and interaction techniques for supporting exploratory data analysis and sense-making. For his PIT@UMass project, Dr. Sarvghad and a team of researchers are designing, building, and evaluating a voice-enabled conversational health journaling system for Parkinson’s Disease patients. By enabling patients to interact with the system conversationally, it lowers the barrier to access for patients with difficulty using a mouse and keyboard due to reasons such as hand tremors, while enriching the depth and breadth of self-reported health data by simulating and sustaining a medically relevant dialogue with the users. (Personal Website)
"... how can we help them (patients) to collect this data and then use that data to help their caregivers and healthcare providers to be more efficient and effective."
Student Research Posters
Student Research Posters
Eli Boahen
As Society 5.0 becomes a growing topic of discussion across industries, the societies of science-fiction feels just a few beta tests away. But what are the implications? Cyborg Anthropology and Technology Ethics research will play a role in law, policy, and regulation [1]. This poster reviews the Cyborg Sensibilities Survey which explores present sentiments towards the new other.
Adam Lechowicz, Noman Bashir, John Wamburu, Mohammad Hajiesmaili, Prashant Shenoy
In the U.S., residential energy usage is responsible for about 20% of total yearly GHG emissions. A big portion of this is due to residential heating [1]. Residential heating is important for decarbonization — the world’s colder climates still depend on fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas to heat homes. There is a push to electrify this sector. In this work, we propose a novel optimization framework which maximizes the carbon impact of a decarbonization investment by leveraging knowledge of the electric and natural gas distribution networks. We show that we can achieve up to 55% greater reductions in carbon emissions by explicitly considering the financial benefits of decommissioning natural gas infrastructure. Furthermore, we extend our framework with equity constraints, which allow an arbitrary distribution of investment into different neighborhoods or groups (e.g. low vs. high income), without losing carbon benefits.
Yuzhen Zhang, Surja Pathak, Gabriella Curry, Ngoc Vu, Lili He
Surveilling bacterial cells on food-contact surfaces is essential to ensure food safety and mitigate the risk of the potential for foodborne-illness outbreaks. However, current methods face challenges. The plate count method is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The rapid adenosine triphosphate (ATP) method is associated with lack of standardization and insufficient specificity to differentiate between bacterial ATP and food ATP. This study aims to develop a rapid, simple, cost-effective method to detect and quantify bacterial cells on food-contact surfaces. The Salmonella enterica (SE1045) cells distributed on 10 × 10 cm2 stainless-steel surfaces were collected by swabbing with the ethanol-moistened foam swab. The collected SE1045 cells were released into 300 μL ethanol. Then 5 μL of the suspension was dropped onto a prepared 3-mercaptophenylboronic acid (3-MPBA) coated gold chip, where 3-MPBA binds to the glycans on the bacterial outer surface to achieve non-specific bacterial species detection and enable the visualization of individual bacterial cells under a smartphone light microscope which was purchased from Amazon for $ 30. Cell numbers were quantified by our developed smartphone application (Bactiscan) with embedded ImageJ function. This method demonstrated good quantification capability for SE1045 cells on stainless-steel surface in the range of 103-107 CFU (r2 = 0.9586) with the limit of detection as low as 2000 CFU/100cm2. The entire procedure (from swabbing to getting results) was able to be accomplished within 5 minutes. The consumable (excluding the smartphone microscope) costs only $ 2 per sample. Moreover, our developed APP is currently available in Apple Store for free download and use. Our developed method presented a novel solution for rapid assessing surface bacterial contamination. While it is still in an early exploration stage, our method exhibits a great application and market potential for bacterial surveillance on food contact surfaces.
Leslie Roberts
The annual greenhouse gas emissions caused by the growing, processing, and disposal of wasted food are roughly equivalent to the emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants (Buzby, 2022). Major generators of food waste include grocery stores, restaurants, colleges, hospitals, and nursing homes (MassDEP, 2022). There are many such generators located in Amherst, Massachusetts. The state organic waste ban prohibits the production of more than ½ ton per week, but nearly all of the Amherst generators are routinely in violation (MassDEP, 2022). One solution that is both more eco-friendly and cost-effective is to divert compostable waste from landfills to anaerobic digesters; these are sealed containers that break down organic matter and produce biogas, a source of renewable energy (EPA, 2023b). The nearest digester is eight miles southwest of Amherst, in the neighboring town of Hadley (EPA, 2023a). The goal of this study is to determine the best location for an anaerobic digester in Amherst, minimizing the distance between the digester and the area(s) with the most significant concentration of food waste.
Hochul Hwang, Hee-Tae Jung, Tim Xia, Daniel Gorbunov, Shifan Zhu, Ken Suzuki, Ibrahima Keita, Lijun Zhang, Matthew Hersey, Millan Taranto, James Grevis, Aidan McCormack, Hui Guan, Nicholas A Giudice, Joydeep Biswas, Sunghoon Ivan Lee, Donghyun Kim
Dog guides are favored by blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals for their ability to enhance independence and confidence by reducing safety concerns and increasing navigation efficiency compared to traditional mobility aids. However, only a relatively small proportion of BLV people work with dog guides due to their limited availability and associated maintenance responsibilities. There is considerable recent interest in addressing this challenge by developing legged guide dog robots. This study was designed to determine critical aspects of the handler-guide dog interaction and better understand handler needs to inform guide dog robot development. We conducted semi-structured interviews and observation sessions with 23 dog guide handlers and 5 trainers. Thematic analysis revealed critical limitations in guide dog work, desired personalization in handler-guide dog interaction, and important perspectives on future guide dog robots. Grounded on these findings, we discuss pivotal design insights for guide dog robots aimed for adoption within the BLV community.
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