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PIT in Practice at Harvard University
Tech Science Curriculum and Public Interest Tech Lab
Our social, political, and economic systems are increasingly defined by technology — in particular, by a handful of big tech companies that are driven by profits rather than the public interest. As a result, the technologies they create often put our societies in a “take it or leave it” situation: algorithmic discrimination, widespread mis- and disinformation, and the loss of privacy are just a few of the intractable problems that have come with the proliferation of digital technologies since the late 1990s.
“Technology designers have become our de facto policymakers,” says Latanya Sweeney, a Harvard professor, founding member of the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), and the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sweeney’s research has led to foundational insights about the lack of data privacy in health care and how racial discrimination can be built into algorithms, highlighting the need for new policies to protect civil rights in the digital age.
With the help of Network Challenge funding from PIT-UN, Sweeney has created curricular pathways for undergraduate and graduate students to study and intervene in what she calls “technology-society clashes.”
The Tech Science Program of Study at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government has offered hundreds of students interdisciplinary training, research experience, and opportunities to work on special projects through the Harvard Public Interest Tech Lab, where a team of researchers and developers creates and manages publicly available tech tools to mitigate technology-society clashes.
“We look at the entire technology life cycle, from vision through development and commercialization, all the way to legal and regulatory processes, and its next generation,” Sweeney says. “At every point of those stages, there are tools we can use to figure out whether this technology is creating a clash and what we can do about it.”
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The Tech Science Curriculum
Even though technology design now dictates a wide array of societal systems, from how voter registration systems work to how we receive and process news online, many university degree pathways still practice siloed approaches to training. For example, computer science majors focus mostly on the technical challenges of coding, while few government majors ever learn about computer code at all. Harvard’s Tech Science curriculum is intentionally open to students from any major and places students in interdisciplinary teams to learn about and address technology-society clashes together.
“Our only requirement is that students have some experience with a research methodology,” says Leonie Beyrle, who teaches the PIT courses with Sweeney in addition to serving as research manager for the Public Interest Tech Lab. “Sometimes, the best projects come from students whose backgrounds are in humanities or social science,” she says, citing a student project that did qualitative analysis on content moderation policies from several social media companies and created a rigorous comparative framework for future researchers.
"It's a tricky space, because there are so many problems to work on and things to tackle."
Technology-society clashes are of course far too big and complex for students to meaningfully address through a single course. That’s why Sweeney has them create Tech Study Plans, outlines of projects with research questions, hypotheses, proposed experiments and resources that future student researchers can use as a starting point. Research projects born from these Study Plans are also eligible for submission to the Journal of Technology Science, a peer-reviewed online journal housed at Harvard whose papers are vetted by an editorial board of over 50 academics. The curriculum’s second-semester, hands-on course, “Tech Science to Save the World,” has created over 180 Study Plans, and Sweeney’s team is working to make them available to fellow researchers and teachers through techstudies.net.
Harvard Tech Science alum Ariana Soto, now deputy director of Coding it Forward, says that the experiential learning in Sweeney’s courses was foundational to her career path in public interest technology. “It’s a tricky space, because there are so many problems to work on and things to tackle,” she says. “The coursework really helped me develop a strong skill set in deciding what’s most important and how to build projects that address these issues.”
At the graduate level, Sweeney’s Harvard Kennedy School colleagues David Eaves and Tom Steinberg have also used PIT-UN funding to build coursework. With support from a 2019 Network Challenge grant, they created a free, open-access syllabus for graduate-level courses in public administration entitled “Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age.”
The Harvard Public Interest Tech Lab
As part of developing a comprehensive PIT program, Sweeney also launched the Harvard Public Interest Tech Lab, where a team of technologists design and deploy tools to mitigate the technology-society clashes she explores with her students in the classroom.
VoteFlare emerged from 2017 research Sweeney conducted with a team of researchers and student interns that illustrated how many state websites leave citizens’ voter registration status open to attack. It found 36 state websites where malicious actors using publicly available information or data acquired from third-party brokers could impersonate voters and make simple changes to their listed address or party affiliation to disqualify them from voting in upcoming elections. The study also points to a particularly troublesome possibility: automated attacks on voter registration conducted at a large scale.
VoteFlare is a publicly available platform that alerts users in real time to any changes made in their voter record, offering individuals the opportunity to rebut unauthorized changes to their voter registration. In 2020, the Harvard team worked with the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, to get VoteFlare into the hands of voters prior to the state’s senatorial runoff elections; it was also deployed in the 2022 Texas midterms.
“In this era of mis- and disinformation, the messenger is as important as the message."
“Without question, our takeaways from Georgia and Texas highlight the necessity to build relationships with organizations who are trusted by voters and reflect the diverse communities across the country.” “In this era of mis- and disinformation, the messenger is as important as the message, so it’s essential to work with groups who have a track record of community engagement, especially with marginalized voting populations.”
Visnaw and his team have been busy connecting with state and county election officials to introduce the tool and better understand the challenges facing voting officials as they head into the 2024 election cycle. “We have to meet them where they are and respect the myriad responsibilities that protecting democracy entails in 2024,” Visnaw says.
The Tech Lab offers eight other publicly available tools, including FBarchive, a searchable database of internal Facebook documents leaked in 2021 by whistleblower Frances Haugen. Since its launch in May 2023, the archive has been leveraged for a Harvard case study on social media and mental health harms to teens and, according to FBarchive Manager Gabrielle Malina, by state attorneys general in preparation for a lawsuit against Facebook parent company Meta alleging that the platform unlawfully collects data on children to “exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers.”
FBarchive is available to anyone and can be easily integrated into coursework and student research. Instructors looking to provide hands-on research experience during a contested election year can find in the archive “a wealth of info on U.S. and international elections, which would provide a fascinating comparative perspective on Facebook’s policies and impacts,” Malina says.
Looking Ahead
Since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, Sweeney and Beyrle have been testing generative artificial intelligence tools in the classroom and anticipate that many of this year’s research projects will focus on how chatbots are deployed in the 2024 presidential election campaign. Sweeney says that the rapid onset of generative artificial intelligence tools has accelerated the technology-society clashes she has been studying since the early 1990s.
“In order to right the ship, we need an army of people engaged throughout the life cycle."
“In order to right the ship, we need an army of people engaged throughout the life cycle” of technology, Sweeney says. She hopes that Tech Science alums will move into positions of authority at big tech companies and government, where they can advocate for public interest concerns in technology design and governance. But she’s not holding her breath.
“Sometimes the answer is building our own technology that solves a particular problem,” she says, “one that venture capitalists may not be particularly interested in funding, but one that we as a society really need.”