Indiana University – Bloomington

Indiana University, home to 70,000 undergraduate students, nearly 20,000 graduate students, and 21,000 faculty and staff members, brings together a robust set of resources and programs that intersect with public interest technology. 

Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering (luddy.indiana.edu)
IU established the original School of Informatics in 1999, the first school of its kind in the U.S. and, at that time, the first new school at IU Bloomington in 25 years. In the 20 years since its inception, the school has added IU’s highly ranked programs in computer science, library and information sciences, and statistics. Then in 2016, it added a new program in intelligent systems engineering, IU’s first engineering program. The school is now a major source of information technology graduates for the economy of the state of Indiana. The school’s achievements have included pioneering advances in programming languages. It offered the first Ph.D. in informatics and one of the first master’s degrees in cybersecurity, and it has produced influential research in human-computer interaction and complex systems. The school also continues to provide talented graduates and professional expertise to a wide range of computing and information technology businesses and occupations. It places special emphasis on partnering with information technology businesses and addressing needs in Indiana. The school now includes about 21,000 alumni, many of whom work for Indiana’s leading technology employers. Through collaboration with other schools and units at IU, the Luddy School has launched many new majors that exist at the intersection of technology and the “public good.” One recent example is our Cybersecurity and Global Policy major, which launched two years ago with only seven applicants and this year attracted nearly 200. 

Educational Offerings

Community-Centered Planning for Mobility as Social Service

The project will establish a workshop to bring community-centered planning to the emerging technology of autonomous vehicles (AV). The workshop will engage students and community members in planning, prototyping, testing, and evolving community-centered AV planning through public events. It also will create frameworks for ongoing capacity building, impact assessment, and community engagement.

Principal Investigator

Youngbok Hong, Director of Visual Communication Design Graduate Programs, Professor, Herron School of Art + Design

Educational Offerings

Serve AI

Serve IT was founded at IU a decade ago to pair STEM students and
faculty with community non-profits who needed assistance
developing digital tools for organizing, communicating, and
managing public-facing service programs. The program has been
enormously successful, pairing more than 1280 undergraduates with
338 client projects with an estimated value of $5.6 million in savings
to the community. Many of our Serve IT and Teach IT (a partner
organization that works with K-12 students) describe it as a life-
transforming experience. Because Serve IT is so busy working with
clients, it has trouble developing new technological capabilities. It is
important to our community partners that the websites, databases,
and other digital tools that we provide are easy to use, accessible to
all, reliable, secure, private, and relatively low-cost to maintain. The
core technical team would like to develop a next-generation template
architecture that we can deploy for clients that would take advantage
of recent developments in technology, particularly generative AI, that
would provide more intelligent assistance to users and better client
service/communication tools. The Serve IT is a well-developed and
time-tested model that can readily be extended and shared with other
PIT-UN members. In fact, one of the longer term goals that the Serve
AI grant will make possible is the extension of the Serve IT program
to the Indianapolis campus of the Luddy School. While Serve IT has a
long history of serving under-represented groups, the Indianapolis
campus greatly extends our ability to reach under-served and –
represented groups.

Principal Investigator

Nathan Ensmenger, Associate Professor, Luddy School of
Informatics, Computing, and Engineering