Brown University

Career Pipeline & Placement

Tech Policy Fellowship and Playbook

This project will empower students nationwide to explore tech policy and enable local governments to build tech capacity. Through a partnership with Paragon Policy Fellowship, this project will offer 150 students opportunities to work with state and local government officials to address a critical science and technology issue over a 12-week period. They also will develop a playbook to inspire future PIT-government partnerships.

Principal Investigators

Suresh Venkatasubramianan, Professor of Data Science and Computer Science, Professor of Humanities, Interim Director of Data Science

Educational Offerings

Preparing computing students to reimagine technology in the public interest

For the last five years, Brown University’s Socially Responsible Computing (SRC) program has been developing materials to help aspiring technologists recognize the pitfalls of building technology that impacts people without keeping the public interest in mind. Those materials are customized for individual CS courses and inserted into the course structure with the support of STAs (Socially- Responsible Computing TAs).

In this project, our goal is to take those modules and learning objectives linked to individual courses and weave them into an integrated curriculum that spans initial exposure to computing in high school all the way through an undergraduate degree in computing. This integrated curriculum will have an overview of key topics in responsible computing; instructor-facing introductions to topics which explore technological impacts through perspectives from the humanities and social sciences; interdisciplinary learning objectives, methods for assessment, and sample materials that align with this framework The curriculum will be designed for transfer so that other institutions can tailor it for computing programs in a range of educational settings.

We will supplement the college-level curriculum with a curricular framework designed to fit the educational needs of high-school instructors and students. This will help prepare students for more sophisticated engagement with the social impacts of computing in college, while instilling early habits of thinking about public interest as part of CS practice. We will engage high-school students through a two-week summer course aimed at historically-underrepresented students, as well as professional development for high-school data-science teachers in partnership with a national-scale outreach program (called Bootstrap).

Principal Investigators

Julia Netter, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Computer Science and Philosophy

Kathi Fisler, Professor of Computer Science

Brown University is currently in the process of internally approving the establishment of a new Center for Technological Responsibility, Re-Imagination, and Re-Design (CNTR), which is expected to launch in early 2023. This Center will be led by Suresh Venkatasubramanian and housed within Brown’s Data Science Initiative. CNTR’s mission is to redefine computer science education, research, and technology to center the needs, problems, and aspirations of all those that technology has left behind. CNTR aims to achieve its vision through the following goals focused on education, research, and engagement:

1. REFRAME education. Building a people-centered, equitable, and accountable vision of technology starts with education. Students doing data science and computing need to be trained to incorporate these considerations into technology design. And students who study society in all its forms must understand the presence of underlying automated systems that are reshaping the world. This effort is aligned with the field-building area of supporting curriculum and faculty development.
2. REIMAGINE computing research. The goal of the Center is to develop methods for technology design that actively seeks to promote human well-being and flourishing, while also protecting our rights, opportunities for advancement, and access to vital services. The goal is to view technology as a piece of a broader socio-technical system in which feedback from outputs can affect future decisions by the system, and so a single output can have tremendous impact over time. Research should understand not just the immediate impacts of a system, but its long-term effects as well. This effort will support both curriculum and faculty development and
   experiential learning opportunities. 
3. REIGNITE engagement with stakeholders. Technology development is typically framed with two entities in mind: the companies developing it, and the people using it. But the impact of technology goes far beyond these two entities. The Center will connect with stakeholders in the community and in civil society at large to amplify their concerns, identify solutions, and communicate with and educate policymakers and the media to effect change. This effort will support experiential learning opportunities and secondarily, through the development of a stakeholder network, support graduates looking for careers in public interest technology.