 Okay, so our first lightning talk is from Afua Bruce, whose talk is titled, The Career Pipeline Starts Early, PIT in K-12. Afua is a leading public interest technologist who has spent her career working at the intersection of technology, policy, and society. She has worked in and across the government, nonprofit, private, and academic sectors. She has held senior science and technology positions at Datacind, New America, the White House, the FBI, and IBM. Author of the tech that comes next, how change makers, technologists, and philanthropists can build an equitable world. Afua is also a dedicated mentor who has worked with education organizations to promote STEM education for girls, especially girls of color, and is at work on several children's books to inspire children to see the possibilities they can bring into the world through STEM. After Afua will be Jillian Smith, an associate professor and director of the Interactive Media and Game Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, that's pronounced Worcester around these parts. Her research and creative practice focus on generative AI for games, crafts, and pedagogy, creative coding, and generative art, and feminist design and technology. Jillian is an award-winning game designer for her alternate controller game, Threadsteading, which is played on quilting and embroidery machines. Yes, quilting and embroidery machines. Dr. Smith is also a research practitioner in ungrading, especially as it connects with project-based learning, with a focus on student goal setting, metacognition, and self-evaluation. Her teaching blends art, design, and computational concepts and methods. She regularly teaches AI for interactive media and games, novel interface design, computational approaches to design, and ethics of generative AI. Jillian's talk is titled, Pit in Entertainment, Media, and Culture. Unfortunately, our third Lightning Talk speaker, UL Roth, has fallen ill and is unable to attend today. I'm really bummed that he couldn't make it as the trust and safety field is a really interesting pathway for Pitt students. UL is a Knight visiting scholar at U Penn, a tech policy fellow at UC Berkeley, and his research and writing focuses on trustworthy governance approaches for social media, AI, and other emerging technologies. Notably, he was the first head of trust and safety at the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, and I encourage you to learn about his work in trust and safety online. After Jillian will be Justin Paletier from Rochester Institute of Technology, as director of the Cyber Range and Training Center, Justin oversees the premier worldwide offensive cybersecurity competition, which brings together the top ethical hackers from across the planet. With the support of a Pitt UN Network Challenge grant, Justin and his cybersecurity colleagues partnered with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT to develop a cyber protection apprenticeship program, tailored to meet the needs of diverse learners. A combat veteran and formal civil servant, Justin is passionate about leveraging the resources of RIT, one of the largest private universities in the country, to serve the public interest. And his talk is titled, Adapting Cyber Security Training for the Deaf Community. And last but certainly not least is Fran Burman from UMass Amherst. Fran hardly needs an introduction to this crowd, but I'll do it anyways. Director of Public Interest Technology at UMass Amherst, she's a data scientist, whose work focuses on the social and environmental impacts of information technology, and in particular, the internet of things. Her research focuses on the overarching ecosystem, needed to guide the development of information technologies that maximize benefits, minimize risks, and promote individual protections. Her talk today is entitled, Why a Regional Model Makes Sense for PIT. So with that, I'm gonna go drink some water, and I'm going to hand it over to Afua Bruce for her talk entitled, The Career Pipeline Starts Early, PIT in K-12. Welcome Afua. Thanks, Kepp. Hi everyone. I hope you're enjoying what was a delicious lunch. I'm excited to talk to you today about starting the PIT pipeline earlier in the K through 12 grades. So a few years ago in Haleyville, Alabama, 50 students at the Haleyville Tech Center learned of a problem. The local food pantry was unable to start a program to serve and distribute fresh produce because they didn't have enough space in their facilities. With guidance from their teachers, the students worked closely with the food bank and with people who frequented the food bank to learn about their requirements, to learn what they needed, and ultimately to design and construct a walk-in cooler that perfectly fit within the existing space. They were able to build this cooler and make it operational just before Thanksgiving of that year, allowing the food pantry to serve more people with better and higher quality food. This was an example of students applying a tech framing to community problems and changing local policies, in this case of the food pantry and what they could serve. It was an example of public interest technology. Conversations about Pitt, conversations across the Pitt UN for the past five years have really focused on academia. They've built on years of discussions and STS and in government focused on higher education and on professionals. Even mission-driven organizations and community-focused programs also tend to focus on adults. However, just as students learn the fundamental concepts of language and social studies and math in school, shouldn't we also be asking, how are we preparing them to develop socially responsible solutions to challenges in a tech-driven world? How are we teaching them to work in diverse teams to solve these challenges? How are we teaching them fundamental Pitt concepts? We know from years of STEM research that if students don't get the appropriate courses they need in high school, it is very tough to catch them up in college for a successful career in STEM. My argument is that we also need to start teaching Pitt concepts in K through 12 to prepare students to create responsible solutions whether they ultimately choose tech or humanities or law or anything else as their specialty. As the saying goes, you don't have to take my word for it. The research shows that girls start opting out of math as early as age six. Children across the board broadly opt out of fields when they don't see themselves in the work, when they don't understand the connection of the concepts to their daily lives and to their culture. Additional research also shows that sometimes changing the format and the focus increases interest and engagement as a recent paper that examined the use of comics and strong storylines to teach and reinforce STEM concepts to children. So what programs should we be creating and when should we start? I think we should start early and start often. Products such as Goldie blocks have physical and digital programs that focus on story and context, not just the tech or the product. The Goldie block specifically is geared towards children as young as three. We can imagine if that we set these problems and storylines and culturally responsive and appropriate situations, we could really inspire children from a young age to think through this. As Kip mentioned, I have expanded my work to writing kids books from picture books to chapter books that expose students to how do we think about solving community problems that happen to use technology along the way. Iowa State has developed programming that touches thousands of students around the state of Iowa that does things such as teaching data science in terms of updating the school lunch menu and using a spy game to teach about cybersecurity. But back to Pitt UN. We can't expect students who arrive at university from a K through 12 system that pushes specialization to suddenly want to understand to, understand how to think and operate in an interdisciplinary justice-centered way. K through 12 teachers are already overstretched. They need accessible modules to introduce their students to Pitt. This is the opportunity for academia to factor K through 12 students and teachers' interest into curriculum and programming. The recent announcement, in the recent announcement of this year's grant winners from the Pitt UN Challenge, you may have noticed that a handful of this year's grantees are developing and running programs that are targeted for high school students and middle school students. Brown University is preparing computing students to reimagine tech in the public interest. Its curriculum progression is responsible for teaching design courses for high school students and undergraduate students. Cleveland State has a program, an inaugural program called Techbox that approaches minority, middle school and high school students into different state-of-the-art technology and funnels them into digital navigator training to help address the technological needs of seniors in their community. And Northeastern University has launched a civic tech workshop on AI for low income and BIPOC youth in Boston public schools. The overarching program identifies specific learning objectives for the high school curriculum. I think last year, Lemoine Owens College created a what is Pitt workbook for K through 12 and they're in the process of creating a game as well. I think we have a lot of opportunity to use this Pitt UN community to think about how we train and excite the K through 12 area, the K through 12 age group in public interest technology. Thanks. And next up is Jillian Smith. Thank you. Hello everyone. I'm holding my phone because as my notes, I promise I'm not texting in the middle of this. Yes. Oh, there we go. All right. So, hello. My name is Jillian Smith. I am the director of interactive media and game development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It's about an hour west of here for anyone who's wondering where Worcester is and whether more of Massachusetts exists than Boston. So, I want to talk first a little about IMGD and the context that I'm coming into and then what I was asked to do with this talk was to kind of tell you why I think Pitt should care about games and so I'm going to do that. IMGD, interactive media and game development with our oldest program of our kind in the nation. One of the only programs in the nation that has all of the areas of interactive media and games under one academic unit and we have five different degrees. So, yes, you can get a degree in games these days from bachelor's degrees up through terminal degrees. This is a legit academic area of study and it's an emerging discipline and it's an exciting place to be at the formation of a new discipline at this time. So, I'm here to talk to you about how it is that games can be Pitt and Pitt can be games and I'm going to give you five reasons why you should care about games, I think, if you do not already. The first is maybe an obvious one but one that's worth reflecting on. Games is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Games outpaces television, music streaming and movies combined and it is a driver of culture at this moment. HBO's series The Last of Us was based on a video game, The Last of Us and it is a fundamental way that like millions and billions of people in the world are engaging with technology today. The way that we think about technology and the way that we frame technology is often first encountered by people who are playing games. Everything from little mobile puzzle games while you're standing on the train to big titles that take 80 or 100 hours or an infinite number of hours to play and everything in between. So, it's a wonderful way to be able to connect with this general public and be in the public square. Reason number two, why I think you should care about games, we are the ultimate multidisciplinary discipline. You cannot make a game or interactive media without at the very least programming, writing, audio, production, design, art, animation, experience design, communication, marketing. More than that, I'm running down the list of faculty offices all the way to get the disciplinary areas. It is impossible to engage in this area without not applying tech to the arts or applying art to tech, but really truly integrating these things together and learning how to talk to each other. And at this moment of discipline formation for games as a discipline, there's a few universities around the world that are doing this. One of the things that I think we can really bring to the table is that we have become very, very, very good at communicating across disciplinary lines. Okay, reason number three, why I think you should care about games. Especially within academia, games are a wonderful place to be able to experiment with experience, critical design and speculative design. And to do scholarship via design. And we have a number of established research methods within games for being able to conduct research through design. And to give you an example of this and what this can look like in a classroom as well, I recently taught an Ethics of Generative AI course in spring of 2023. And one of my students used off-the-shelf AI technologies including integrated into games like MetaHumans and Unreal Engine to create a fully automated Japanese variety show joke show with an AI-generated script, AI-generated characters and AI voice. And that might sound creepy and weird, but that was the point because he was able in doing this to really showcase the ways in which these systems fail because it's really obvious the difference between what's generative and what's human created in that context. Reason number four, games give us space to let players experiment with technologies in new ways as well. There's a lot of really interesting work right now in games around AI-based game design. How do you create interactive systems that fundamentally require players to be able to interact with AI systems in the game? And again, a really wonderful way of being able to engage with members of the general public. And finally, reason number five, games are fundamentally about intentionally crafting a human experience. The very first thing we think about when we create games is how do we want players to feel while they're playing? What do we want players to experience through this? What is our intent and how do we capture that intent and make it a thing that is resonant with an audience in the same way that storytellers and journalists do? And we do it in a way that is integrated with technology. It's what we're all trying to do. It's what games are trying to do as well. And so I hope to be able to talk to you about some of it today. Thank you. Hello, good afternoon. My name is Justin Pelletier. I'm with the Rochester Institute of Technology. I'm a professor of practice there in the Global Cybersecurity Institute. And I'll be talking about some of the training that we've done over the last few years and how we adapted that training and experiential learning for the deaf community. So I'll ask everybody, you know, as painful as this is, go back to COVID. We're all locked in our basements for what's going on in the world, right? 30 million Americans had a job disruption, whatever the actual numbers were. That's roughly the order of magnitude, right? But we have this systematic and persistent workforce gap in cybersecurity that we've been trying to get after since probably before I was born, I don't know, when cyber actually was a thing. We knew that we needed more stem talent or computer workers to come into this, right? So during that time of disruption, there's an opportunity for change. And looking back on the way that we as educators train the next generation of doers of practitioners in cybersecurity, we had this model for, you know, four-year degrees, master's degrees, and PhDs, whatever, to sort of understand the engineering of the systems, right? So we can think about that maybe like engineering a car, right? Folks in Detroit have jobs engineering cars, but we also need people who can fix cars and we need people who can drive cars safely. So what about the rest of the population, right? They don't necessarily need a degree in engineering to be a good mechanic. They just need to know how to fix the car. And so with that in mind, we created an onboarding program, 15 weeks, 40 hours a week boot camp style, intensive learning. And so we did that all online, right, because everybody's in their basements anyway. So when we did that, we partnered with the National Technical Institute of the Deaf, which is housed at RIT, and said, let's make a deaf cohort for this boot camp. And you know, with typical sort of optimism, I guess, how hard could it be, right? We have everything is written. We can close caption everything. We can maybe get some interpreters if we need to. That's all kind of built in to the community at RIT. We have a really good sort of access technology culture. But there are a lot of things that I came to learn in this process. I'm going to share those with you briefly. First, English is not most deaf persons' first language, which didn't really sink in what that would mean, right? So I'm thinking written language, yeah, we just get, you know, captions of the spoken English. We'll write out the instructions. We'll write out the materials. But it doesn't quite work so easily. If you think about American Sign Language, it's more of a glyph-based language, like a far Eastern language in some ways, not necessarily an Indo-European language with sort of that linguistic structure. And I'm not a linguist. I'm a computer nerd. But I came to appreciate that that actually poses meaningful difficulty when we're trying to communicate, especially deeply technical knowledge and how it interrelates and how you can go about the diagnostic process to be that computer mechanic, so to speak. And so while navigating that, you know, we were going through a bunch of hands-on labs and making them as accessible as we could with clear written instruction that would translate well to the deaf community. And we, by we, I mean, I came to learn something that I unconscious bias, right? I thought that if you have a disability with one of your sensory organs, the others might grow to compensate, right? So if you're deaf, you might have enhanced vision. And if you're blind, you might hear better. That's actually not necessarily true. In fact, there's a really high comorbidity, I came to find out, between blindness and deafness, especially color blindness. So in our disability modifications, we had to take that into account. I encourage you to do the same. We had team meetings that were captioned and interpreted, note-taking. These are complementary. And it's important to have a multiple, a multiplicity of those as a set for the learner to choose from, because some of those appeal most to some and to others they're not as effective. And that, I think, also translates to a single input-output stream. When you can't communicate verbally, everything's going through the eyes, so they can't necessarily watch the captions, pay attention to the facial expression, and look at the slides of a presenter. It just doesn't work. So you have to allow more time for that. Now with the help of Pitt Challenge Award, we converted that training experience and lessons learned into an apprenticeship program where we did on-the-job training, and I'll emphasize just a couple seconds worth of lessons learned. Clear written instructions are very important. Screenshots and tooltips are better. They help to convey and describe that much better. And also, we're really ill-equipped as a community to support professional certification trainings. Most folks probably have a similar bias, as I did in getting started with this and thinking, hey, we'll just close caption it. We'll put a transcript out there, and what's the problem? It's not so simple, so deliberate effort, allowing more time between finishing the course and taking the certificate, for example, is really an important thing, because there's multiple passes to make it all sink in. In any case, thanks for your time and attention, and I hope you have a great day. All right, I can make it as short as I am. There you go. And I'm kind of hoping that lightning talks doesn't mean that the last speaker is struck by lightning while they're talking. The first thing I want to do is I really want to thank New America and BU and ASR, and everybody here for coming. This is just so great to see everybody in one room. I'm Fran Berman, and I'm here today to speak about regional hubs, so I'm going to start with the end. And the end is, we have really benefited here in New England, and I think it's true all around the country that our community really benefits from regional hubs, so here's some takeaways. The first thing is that regional hubs really help us maximize our impact. They help us not only capitalize on the goals that we share, but leverage regional diversity, and I'll talk a little bit about that. The second thing is that organic hubs are kind of, regional hubs are kind of the organic missing link. We all work at our home institutions, and we all work at the national level, and this allows us kind of an organizational construct in between to really maximize the things we want to do. And I really think that hubs are an important part of the future of public interest technology and of our community. So let me tell you how it all started. For me, in 2021, I was recruited to UMass Amherst to launch and lead a public interest technology initiative in that my fabulous colleague, Ethan Zuckerman, and I decided to apply to the Pitt University network that fall, and we were really thrilled to be part of this community. In the spring, we wanted to actually get to know the many schools around New England within driving distance who were doing public interest technology, and so UMass has a new campus in the outskirts of Boston at Mount Ida. We invited Boston University and MIT and Harvard and Olin and Northeastern and Tufts and WPI and a host of other places to a meeting, and the idea of the meeting was just to get to know each other. What's your institution like? What are you doing? What do you find challenging? Can we help each other on some things? And that meeting was eye-opening. We were actually quite frank with each other about what was working, what was not working, where we needed help, and there was so much energy and enthusiasm in the room, we decided that this meetup would keep happening. So in the last year and a half, we've met every spring and every fall, and it really grew out of our desire to do two things. One thing is to be more successful in the Pitt activities we were already doing in our home institution. And the second thing was to be successful doing things that require more than what we can do at one institution, to be synergistic and collaborative. And so it turns out that this notion of the regional gathering, the regional hub really provides this great organizational structure that stands between our individual institutions and the national community. So why is that? Well, locally, as we all know from our own institutions, it's a really nuanced political environment to try to navigate and promote public interest technology. And I would say for virtually all of us, public interest technology is not number one, it's rarely number one. And so we need some sort of community and some sort of group of partners and resources to really make the impact we want to make. The reason why we're all here in the first place. And so the region has really provided a lot for us. I'll tell you a little bit about that in a second. Nationally, we're here because of our commonality and our belief that social responsibility really makes a difference in all the things that we need to do. And there's strength in numbers, so that's a really important thing. But it's a bit hard to leverage the diversity of where we come from and the kinds of things we're interested in at the national level. So again, hubs provide that missing link. It provides a way for us to focus on both commonality and diversity. And then we can really think about things like career pathways and sustainability, institutionalization and things that many of us care about. So what happens on the ground for a regional hub? And let me tell you that specificity matters and that all of the hubs will not be different. And this is what thrills me about what seems to be happening in the Pitt University Network is it isn't just the New England hub. There are hubs coming out in the south and the west in the New York region. And we've been talking to people all over the country to see what they can do. So let me tell you what has happened on the ground for us in New England. Over the last year and a half our original members have been meeting and now we have at least twice that many interested in meeting with us and we'll have our next meeting in January and we'll have to order a lot more food which is completely thrilling. All of us can drive or take the tea and we're less than two hours from each other so we're proximate to one another and that's a wonderful thing about New England. Another thing that's really wonderful about New England is New England has this stickiness. People stay in the region after they go to school. They get jobs in the region. They are families who are in the region. Maybe they go away from the region and they come back from the region so it gives us an opportunity to really invest in this region in terms of the Pitt workforce here. Our meetings have created really strong bonds. We've written tenure letters for junior faculty members who are not at our own institution. We've developed student opportunities. We've collaborated on proposals. We've provided a community for Pitt faculty who often feel kind of lonely in their own environments because there are not enough other people at their institution in Pitt. So we've been able to be agile and let me give you an example of something we're really excited about that we're able to do regionally. Boston University has a great summer intensive and they have terrific programming around that. UMass Amherst has a new campus at Mount Ida and we don't have enough programming there yet but we have space. We have space which is very valuable these days. MIT, as you all have heard, has really outstanding cybersecurity materials. Olin has a really great way a really great model of having student driven things. So what we're going to do is we're going to come together this summer and we're going to have programming from all around the region. We're going to invite a much broader and diverse set of students to introduce them to Pitt. We're going to have programming that involves all of our regional members and this really is happening because of the regional construct that we're all part of. Let me tell you that knowing our region also matters. So what's interesting about New England is that we're both rural and urban and the way that plays out is that many of the schools in Boston have really deep connections with one another. They're really strong on the humanities and policy and tech and there is a lot of joint programs and for those of us outside of Boston we often live in very rural places. I'm from western Massachusetts in the Pioneer Valley and Pioneer Valley is home to a number of institutions, not just UMass, Amherst, Smith and Mount Holyoke and Amherst College and Hampshire College and lots of different places. We're pretty rural and in the Pioneer Valley there is over 60 townships with less than 10,000 people. So in some sense our more rural campuses really have an outside connection with their local townships and can really help promote public interest technology in a really different way. So what we're finding is that that makes for us in the region the diversity and the size of the workforce really important. Our students are staying in the region some of them might become the mayor of Hatfield or the city council of Boston or part of an institution somewhere in the Boston area and what we want to do is make sure that they are more diverse that they are trained in public interest technology literacy, social literacy, tech literacy pragmatic social pragmatic public interest technology solutions etc. So we're working on that and we are very excited to say that we have now gone beyond all volunteer expert efforts to be a hired our first regional person at Colette Vassiliere who is really overseeing for the whole region how we can do that and collect funds as her day job. Great. So there's more we can do but I want to also say that we are incredibly grateful for the support that we've gotten from New America and Pitt UN I think they've been in partnership with us all along the way and they've come to all of our meetings and they're giving us an opportunity to talk about our experiences here. So I'll leave you with one thing Hubs work best if they're value-added for each member they have to make you more successful in what you do. Hubs work best if they're value-added for the region. They allow you to do bigger things than you could do all by yourself and I think Hubs are going to be a really important part of New America and Pitt University so thank you.