The speakers.

Chrissy Lynch

President of Massachusetts AFL-CIO

Chrissy Lynch was unanimously elected as President of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO in October 2023 after previously serving as the Secretary-Treasurer and Chief of Staff of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, after spending 15 years running the political and legislative departments of the MA AFL-CIO.

Chrissy is a current member of LiUNA Local 22 and former member and steward of OPEIU Local 6. Before her time with the Labor Movement, she worked jobs that hadn’t yet been organized – including several years as a barista, waitstaff, and PCA. Her experience in non-union sectors led her to the Labor Movement.

Chrissy is a graduate of the Harvard Trade Union Program in the Harvard Labor and Worklife Center at Harvard Law School, has a Master’s Degree in Labor Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from Suffolk University, and an Associate’s Degree from Massasoit Community College. She lives in Quincy with her husband, 2 children and 2 dogs.

Eric Gordon

Director, Center on Media Innovation for Social Impact, Affiliated Faculty, Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS); Professor of the Practice, Journalism, College of Communication, Boston University 

Eric is the director of the Center on Media Innovation for Social Impact at Boston University and a professor of practice in the Journalism department. He studies technology, democracy, and public engagement, with a specific focus on the role of narrative, data, and algorithms on institutional trust and governance. He specializes in collaborative research and design processes, and has served as an expert advisor for local and national governments, as well as NGOs around the world, designing responsive processes that help organizations transform to meet their stated values. He is specifically recognized for his work in civic games, designing games to foster democratic participation in the US, Egypt, Bhutan, Romania, and many other countries. 

He is a founding member of the RethinkAI collective which works with communities and local governments around the US to build community-centered use cases of generative AI for public value. He is the author of 5 books and over 50 articles and chapters on media and democracy. His new book, Generative Listening: How We Can Leverage New Tech to Build Trust will be published by MIT Press in 2026. 

Carolina Rossini

Director of Public Interest Technology (PIT) Programs and Professor of Practice, School of Public Policy, UMass Amherst

Prof. Carolina A. Rossini is an expert in technology policy and law with over 25 years of experience leading global initiatives across the private, nonprofit, and academic sectors. She has advised governments, international organizations, philanthropy, and corporations on digital governance, technology innovation, and human rights, with a strong focus on the Global South.

As Director of Programs at PIT@Umass and a professor of practice at the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, she promotes equitable and ethical digital innovation through teaching, community-building, and designing curricula integrating law, technology, and public policy. She is also a Law Lecturer at Boston University School of Law and a PIT SPARK Fellow.

Previously, Carolina co-founded and directed the think tank Datasphere Initiative, served as CEO of the Portulans Institute, and - as a lawyer and advocate - held leadership roles at Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Facebook. She has participated in high-level global forums, including UN agencies, the G20/T20, and World Economic Forum Councils.

Carolina holds advanced degrees in law, international relations, and business from institutions including Boston University, Instituto de Empresas, Oxford, and the University of São Paulo. She continues to drive inclusive, rights-based technology frameworks and large-scale digital public infrastructure projects in Latin America and beyond.

Jane Fountain

Director, School of Public Policy, UMass Amherst

Jane E. Fountain is Director of the School of Public Policy and Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is an Adjunct Distinguished Professor by appointment in the College of Information and Computer Sciences. Fountain served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 2015 to 2018 and Interim Director of the Center for Public Policy & Administration (now the School of Public Policy) from 2006 to 2007.

Fountain was the co-founder and director of the National Center for Digital Government, from 2002 to 2022. In 2013 she was awarded the UMass Amherst Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed to faculty on the campus. In 2010 she received the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity.

Fountain was named to the list of the 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government in 2018 and 2019 by apolitical and was named a Federal 100 awardee in 2013. She is an elected fellow (2012) and Secretary of the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Public Administration; is a former chair, vice chair, and invited member of the World Economic Forum Global Advisory Council on the Future of Government; was a member of American Bar Association blue ribbon commission on the Future of e-Rulemaking; and was an appointed member of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Governor’s Council on Innovation.

Rodica Neamtu

Professor of Teaching, Computer Science Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

Rodica Neamtu is a Professor of Teaching in the Computer Science Department at WPI. She is also a co-founder and co-director of the Bucharest Project Center. Rodica conducts research that investigates how to develop and leverage ground-breaking techniques to explore time series datasets at the confluence of theoretical computer science and application domains like medicine, neuroscience, economics, and complex decision making. Her interdisciplinary research collaborations range from her co-founded Data-Driven Materials Science Research Group, to Brain Wave Analytics, Data Series Management, and using Machine learning to create mobile applications for Augmentative Alternative Communication for people with disabilities. 

As a co-director of the Bucharest Project Center, Rodica works every year with students engaged in collaborations with non-profit organizations that aim to offer practical solutions to global problems. Co-directing a project center in Romania allows her to contribute to building a strong connection between the two cultures that she is deeply anchored in. Rodica is committed to help students explore other cultures, understand the issues that they are facing, and become part of impactful initiatives to mitigate them.  Advising project teams is one of the most engaging and rewarding aspects of her work.

With more than fifteen years of teaching experience in various academic institutions, Rodica is committed to use her love and talent for teaching and research to empower others through education to make a difference in the world.

Yuriy Brun

Co-Director, Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER), Co-Director, Programming Languages and Systems at Massachusetts Group (PLASMA), Professor, Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst

Dr. Burn is a Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences whose research focuses on making it easier to build and deploy software systems, and ensuring that they abide by desirable behavioral constraints. His research is centered around automation and software behavior. He develops techniques that automatically enforce behavior on systems, automatically mine behavioral models of software to help developers understand system behavior, and automatically repair systems to satisfy the behavioral requirements imposed on them. 

He works closely with developers to understand the challenges they face and to build tools to help them. He works closely with systems to understand where they go wrong and how to automate preventing that from happening. The long-term goal of this research is self-adaptive systems that self-monitor, self-manage, and self-correct their own behavior to achieve high-level goals in dynamic, constrained environments. 

Focusing on software fairness, Brun has developed automated techniques to test software, particularly software that uses machine learning or other data mining methods, for bias, and to help enforce fairness constraints during the learning process.