INTERVIEWER: What is PIT?
FRAN BERMAN: Public interest technology is about the design, development, and realization of social responsibility in a tech-powered world. PIT solutions are people-centered, sensitive to the communities and cultural environments they will be deployed in, and use data, AI, and other technologies responsibly.
PIT is inherently interdisciplinary. Problems need to be solved with all the tools available to us. And really, it’s just us who put the boundaries around our fields. “This is biology, but not chemistry.” “This is computer science, but not policy.” The fact is that we need to use multiple tools and perspectives to solve real-world problems. We need many points of view from many disciplines, we need innovative ways of approaching problems. PIT thinking invites us to think about what matters most in a given context, and how things will work for people in real-world environments. For instance, think about surveillance. Sometimes surveillance protects us, sometimes it intrudes upon us. The difference is context, and the context is always very rich.
As citizens we see the impacts of digital technologies all the time, especially since the Internet and many of its apps and services are now critical infrastructure. We use them for connecting, doing business, learning, entertainment. By and large, technologies are governed by the culture of the market rather than the need for public protections. Smart appliances and home systems aren’t always secure. Your private information is collected because you googled something, logged into a particular site, or answered a particular email. Your digital profile is unknown to you but the source of decisions on pricing, opportunities you’re offered, ways you’re exploited. I think all of us all the time are bumping up against the flaws of digital technologies and the lack of public protections.
INTERVIEWER: What has your “journey to PIT” been?
FRAN BERMAN: Professionally speaking, I think I've been interested in PIT issues and social responsibility my whole career. But PIT was never formally part of my training and education, and it wasn’t part of the metrics of success for my disciplinary research. I was in mathematics and computer science, and we didn't learn about PIT issues and social impact issues. But once you embed what you create in the real world, those social impacts are everywhere. Throughout my career, I saw this at a big scale. I ran the San Diego Supercomputer Center and then was VP for research at a former institution. In those positions I saw the ways in which researchers developed tools and then tried to apply their results to communities. Sometimes the application of their results was not equitable. Sometimes the application of those results put application optimization over privacy protections, adequate security, or sustainability considerations. It’s not enough to solve the problem. We need to solve the problem in a way that works for society. There are social impacts to the way we design and deploy and manage technology. Social impacts to essentially all the decisions we make. I’ve always been interested in those impacts, whatever job I've had.
When I discovered the actual title of Public Interest Technology, I felt like I had found the profession I've been doing my whole career. My education did not involve the wonderful PIT options we have at UMass today, and if I had had those when I was in college, I think it might have set me on a really different course in terms of job opportunities and things I wanted to pursue.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us about PIT@UMass. What are the goals and vision of the initiative?
FRAN BERMAN: PIT@UMass is a really exciting initiative. It gives us an opportunity to explore what it looks like to develop higher education for the 21st century. Everybody across campus is dealing with a world where technology leads, where AI is increasingly important, where masses of data can be collected and analyzed. Technology has fundamentally changed the way we teach, do business, research and learn. It doesn't matter whether you're a nurse or a humanities major or an engineer or a computer scientist. PIT@UMass gives us an opportunity to develop a program for everyone, to provide the skills and perspectives we need to operate successfully in the 21st century. It’s been a joy to engage across campus and with students from all schools and colleges who are eager to incorporate social responsibility in their work.
There are three signature initial components of the PIT@UMass program. The first is a general education class called Introduction to Public Interest Technology (CICS 127), which I am currently teaching this spring and which will be offered every year. The point of this course is to invite every undergraduate student—in every major in every school and college, and at every level from freshman to senior—to learn a broad portfolio of strategies to promote the public interest and gain literacy around social responsibility and technology. So far our experience with this class is that students really enjoy getting to see things beyond their discipline and getting to think about issues that are intrinsic to their present lives and future careers. Many if not all of our students will be going into careers where AI will make an impact. To help them think about AI responsibly, we talk a lot about AI in CICS 127: when it's useful, when it's not useful, when it's intrusive, when it’s wrong. These conversations help students develop critical thinking skills and ways of approaching AI and technology that will enable them to make the most of these tools and minimize their risks.
The second signature component is the undergraduate PIT certificate, which expands on CICS 127 – the Intro to PIT course. The certificate provides a way for students to take a portfolio of courses across campus (including CICS 127) that deepen their knowledge of tech, sense of social responsibility, and exposure to a wide range of strategies for public interest problems. The certificate also gives students an opportunity to put ideas into practice, in either a capstone project or some kind of experiential learning project. The certificate documents the fact that students can operate as public interest technologists, and that they can take these skills into whatever job they go to.
We are also building the community of PIT faculty with the third signature component – the PIT Fellows program, with some of the Fellows’ work included in this exhibit. PIT Fellows each year form a cohort to design and develop socially responsible coursework and research projects. PIT Fellows come from across campus and form a strong community that can help inform and support their work. We have had PIT Fellows from almost every school and college and they are an important part of the PIT@UMass community and initiative.
Finally, PIT@UMass is also focused on making a positive impact in our region and our community. This year, we launched a regional consortium with partner Boston University called PIT New England that enables us to join forces with other universities and organizations across New England for training, education, and community-focused programs. We have over 20 partners in the consortium at present and big plans for joint PIT regional programming.
INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the future of PIT@UMass?
FRAN BERMAN: The skills and perspectives students learn in PIT@UMass are fundamental to good citizenship and responsible professionalism in the 21st century. With PIT@UMass, UMass is pioneering the development of all-campus programming and our goal is for this to be institutionalized and to continue to be developed for the foreseeable future. It is a thrill to see UMass students learn approaches that help them make the world a better place for all of us, and to gain the skills and literacies required to put into practice what they’ve learned through the way they think about things, the questions they ask, the knowledge they have, their proactivity, and their capacity to learn.
The PIT@UMass initiative is helping our students and faculty manage very, very powerful technologies that have tremendous benefits and extreme risks. One of the best things about the initiative to me is the tremendous shared commitment at UMass to social responsibility. Everyone on campus really wants to make this a better world and is doing that in their own way. PIT@UMass has come as far as we have and as quickly because of the strong sense of social responsibility at UMass, and a shared commitment as educators to help our students develop their own sense of social responsibility.
I would say the biggest challenge for PIT@UMass is the challenge that everyone has in organizations: there are never enough resources and there's never enough time for anyone to focus on programming unless it is part of their day job. For PIT@UMass, the challenge has been to institutionalize programming in a way that works for both faculty and students, to institutionalize organizational leadership who can oversee the initiative to promote impact and success, and to garner resources from both inside and outside the university for a comprehensive set of programs.
When I first came to UMass in 2021, initially it was really important to get to know the landscape. When you start a hopefully successful program, it’s important to leverage the strength and assets of the institution, and you have no way of knowing what those are until you talk to people. In 2021-2022, I had the great pleasure of talking to a wide variety of people (including the Deans) in essentially every school and college across campus – it took more than one hundred first coffees! And those relationships have sustained: many of the folks that I talked with have been involved in the PIT@UMass initiative in key ways: some faculty have become PIT Fellows in the PIT Fellows program, some are teaching classes that are electives for the certificate. The students established PIT grad and undergrad clubs almost before we had coursework and the certificate. Many faculty, staff, centers, and students have arranged programming and events with PIT@UMass.
We want to keep having all those relationships and building community because community is really important to the success of public interest technology. I wish I could have a hundred more coffees across campus every year but you need a team. One of the things we're doing right now is building that team. Not just the team of people involved in PIT@UMass programming, but also a leadership team who can engage more deeply across campus, more broadly within the community, and who can help develop funding sources and curricula and content. Having that team is really important.
The first year I came to UMass I developed a lot of relationships and took a scan of the landscape. In the second year, Ethan Zuckerman, Charlie Schweik and I — with support from each and every one of the Deans, including Laura Haas and Karl Rethemeyer—really started to build PIT@UMass. Ultimately we developed eight different programmatic components that make up the PIT@UMass initiative. This third year we're building the resources to make each one of those components successful. We’re expanding the number of PIT-related courses, continuing to build relationships, hiring leaders for key PIT@UMass components, and trying to fundraise. We're getting to know a whole new administration which is exciting. So each year brings new opportunities and new challenges, and allows us to build on the year before and set ourselves up for success in the year after that.
INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the future of PIT as a field?
FRAN BERMAN: There’s currently an interesting national conversation about whether PIT is a field or an emergent area – either way, the forward trajectory is the same and focused on impact. Like many analogous fields at their inception – public interest law, environmental studies, data science – PIT is in the “swarmball” stage. For all of these fields, it took time for curricula to coalesce, programs to be institutionalized and academic infrastructure to be developed – majors, conferences, journals, publications, funding sources. During this initial “swarmball” stage for PIT, curricula is being developed, the academic community is becoming more sharply focused, and PIT research and education is being incorporated into adjacent disciplines and academic environments in a more explicit way. I think the work we are doing at UMass – where PIT is a part of a wide variety of disciplines and domains across campus – is pioneering in its breath, substance, and inclusiveness, and I think PIT@UMass is providing an important model for the nation.
It’s an exciting time but also a challenging one. To mix metaphors, the PIT community is building the train as it is going down the track. In university systems, if you want to be a traditional faculty member, your success depends on your ability to publish in well-recognized journals and conferences, to get funding from either nonprofits or federal funders that recognize the importance of your field, and to cultivate the support of senior people in your field who can write your tenure and promotion letters. Now, at its beginning, PIT is a little lacking in all of that. Although there are senior people in PIT, it's really hard for people to get tenure with a PIT background except in very savvy institutions. It's hard to publish because there aren't that many PIT journals and conferences. There isn't enough PIT funding, especially for pragmatic, high-impact projects. And so if you look at the usual academic metrics of success, PIT is very focused on real-world outcomes which are often very hard to describe in a scholarly way and measure. PIT impact really has to do with the proof of the pudding: Have you incorporated public protections? Have you factored societal risks and mitigations into solution strategies? Are solutions sustainable, equitable, fair? Those things don't always fit well in scholarly research. So PIT is both critical for society to thrive, but hard to describe and under-resourced. In some ways, PIT is dealing with the same issues that public interest law, or environmental studies must have had at the beginning of their own trajectories.
I'm not sure if PIT will ever be a field in the same way that mathematics is a field or philosophy is a field, but I do think that PIT thinking and efforts are critical for the well-being of the human race. If we don't start prioritizing the public interest in some important way, then we do ourselves a disservice, perhaps a fatal disservice. Whether or not PIT is a field and whether or not PIT is a major, we still need to know how to think like public interest technologists, and we still need to create the academic infrastructure that makes PIT important enough for students to include it in their schedules, for faculty to include it in their course offerings and research, and for the administration to include it as they envision and resource our educational, research, outreach, and engagement mission.
INTERVIEWER: If a student is interested in pursuing a career in PIT, where should they start?
FRAN BERMAN: I'm excited to say one of the first things they might do is take CICS 127, our Introduction to PIT course. That will give them a really solid grounding, not just in various ways that PIT impacts the real world, but also with our campus. In CICS 127, guest speakers from across campus introduce ways of thinking about and incorporating PIT in their disciplines. Undergrads should also think about getting a PIT certificate, which will give them experience with public interest technology as it plays out in various disciplines, and will provide them with – and document – a solid set of broad-based PIT literacies, experiences and skills. If students are undergraduates, we have an emerging PIT Club they can join. If they're grad students, they can join the Responsible Technology Coalition, the successful grad PIT club. All of these are ways to bring students into contact with others who care about the same things they do – social impact, responsible use of technology, societal well being. Another thing students can do is reach out to a PIT@UMass Faculty Fellow in their departments. That’s often a way in which students get involved with PIT@UMass research and educational offerings as they are being developed. All of this is important because it takes a community to do effective things, and it often takes a community to advance your own thinking. Student engagement with PIT courses, the PIT certificate, PIT clubs, with the PIT community will be very helpful.
INTERVIEWER: If a faculty member is interested in incorporating PIT principles into their work, or in developing a PIT project, where should they start?
FRAN BERMAN: We would love to see those faculty in the PIT@UMass Faculty Fellowship program. We do this every year. The first year we focused on educational curricula with a PIT component. The second year we focused on research with a PIT component. And this year we're focusing on capstone projects and experiential learning courses with a PIT component. We have a terrific set of Fellows and Fellow alumni, and I'm excited to see this next group. Faculty can definitely reach out to me (fberman@umass.edu), or to PIT@UMass Executive Director Donna Baron (dbaron@umass.edu) and I would encourage them to apply. The Faculty Fellowship provides a very small stipend, but the most important thing it provides is community. Our Fellows cohorts have created a strong PIT campus community. They get to know faculty from other schools and colleges across campus and often find opportunities to collaborate and work together. PIT takes a village and the Faculty Fellows and other programming helps enrich and connect our campus community.