June 8, 2021
Editor's Letter
Welcome to the June edition of PIT UNiverse, covering news and events from PIT-UN and our 43 member institutions.
An important appeal from us: PIT-UN is looking for experts to support Year 3 of the PIT-UN Challenge by serving on the Evaluation Committee (EC). The EC plays a critical role in reviewing applications from Network members and putting together the shortlist of projects to receive funding from the Challenge.
Please note that the Challenge organizers are particularly interested in potential EC members who bring expertise in the following areas: data and algorithms; diversity, equity, and inclusion in technology; digital privacy and security; open source and creative commons; access, digital divide, and digital literacy; human rights; and policy (e.g. internet freedom, net neutrality).
To express your interest in serving on the EC, please complete a short interest form via Foundant here (using access code “PIT-UNEC”).
The Challenge team will be in touch via email if your background, expertise, and interests are a strong fit for the Year 3 EC. Please reach out to pitunchallenge@newventurefund.org with any questions or related inquiries.
In this issue:
Get a look at Segregation Is Killing Us - a project to map how the racial divide in New York City is itself a public health crisis.
We spotlight Network member California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo, CA, a university with a unique "Learn by Doing" philosophy.
PIT-UN grantee Katie Cumiskey of City University of New York's College of Staten Island discusses her project creating a tech talent pipeline and -- PIT entrypoint -- for local students.
Karen Bannan catches up with Daisy Magnus-Aryitey, Co-Founder of Code the Dream.
Scroll down to Discovery for events and opportunities from around the Network. And don't forget to follow New America PIT on Twitter and join our PIT-UN LinkedIn group to stay connected.
Stay safe and healthy,
Karen Bannan, editor-in-chief and Austin Adams, managing editor
Have a PIT event, job posting, or other opportunity at your school you’d like to promote in next month’s newsletter? Reach out to us at pituniverse@newamerica.org with details. We're also always looking for projects and programs to highlight in our Grantee Spotlight and Member Spotlight columns.
In Your Orbit
Racism takes many forms and is ingrained in much of government technology and infrastructure. This truism extends to urban planning and design, too. A growing number of researchers and experts say Urbicide, the inequitable development or relining of cities, is creating segregation and harming poor, Black, and brown people disproportionally. Zarith Pineda, Founder and Executive Director of Territorial Empathy, is trying to do something about this issue, and she’s tackling the problem using public interest technology.
Pineda, who came to the U.S. from Columbia as a child, is an architect and urbanist. She grew up in Boston and attended Columbia University, studying urban design. She wrote her thesis on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but realized that the harm that was happening in her own country was just as frightening.
Indeed, after seeing how communities were displaced through urban renewal to “connect white folks that were emigrating to suburbs to downtowns for work,” subsequently destroying prosperous communities of color, Pineda realized that she could make a difference right here in the U.S., she says.
Member Spotlight
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California
Long before public interest technology was a recognized term, California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) was offering students a comprehensive technical education that went beyond hard skills via its interdisciplinary studies and a laser-like focus on experiential learning.
“It’s in the water here,” says Dr. Matthew Harsh of the school’s “Learn by Doing” pedagogy. Harsh, who is Associate Professor and head of the Center for Expressive Technologies, serves as Cal Poly’s PIT-UN designee.
Learn by Doing has been Cal Poly’s mantra since it was founded in 1901. Originally focused on agriculture and engineering studies, the school now offers more than 60 baccalaureate degrees in technical fields and the humanities. Harsh says Cal Poly takes interdisciplinary studies and experiential learning seriously, making it a natural fit for training in what we now call public interest technology.
“Our job is to train people for the future workforce of California, and so many of those jobs are going to be public interest technology jobs,” says Harsh. “If you’re studying engineering and computer science, or even agriculture or architecture here... you’re still getting that interdisciplinary content.” Read the full story here.
Grantee Spotlight
Building a Pipeline Into PIT at College of Staten Island, CUNY
How can schools attract students to public interest technology? This question is one that’s being posed to PIT-focused faculty across the Public Interest Technology University Network. Conversations around the issue have a common theme: Students are very interested in public interest tech, but only after they hear about it. Before that, however, they typically don’t know that PIT exists, or can’t see how it aligns with the majors and career choices they are interested in pursuing.
Rev. Dr. Kathleen M. Cumiskey of City University of New York’s (CUNY) College of Staten Island (CSI) is using her 2020 Network Challenge grant to develop a solution to this problem. The best part: It leverages CSI’s relationships with the community. Today, the grant is helping CSI recruit a diverse group of local high school students for an intentional learning community centered around PIT.
Working with feeder high schools on Staten Island, CSI selected 24 high school seniors for the program. The students were accepted to CSI, given an online orientation, and entered their freshman year of college enrolled in a slate of general education classes infused with a focus on PIT. Read more about PIT at CSI here.
PIT In Practice
Q&A With Daisy Magnus-Aryitey, Co-Founder of Code the Dream
According to Data USA, the average American software developer is about 40-years-old and earns $109,309 per year. They are also overwhelmingly male – about 81 percent of developers identify male – and white with more than half of the software developers falling into that category. Another 33 percent are Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI). And yet this demographic spread looks nothing like the makeup of America. More than half of the people born today are people of color, and one in four have an immigrant parent. This disparity was the impetus for Ramiro Rodriguez, Daisy Magnus-Aryitey, and Dan Rearick to launch Code the Dream, an organization dedicated to educating and training people of color and immigrants to become software developers.
PIT UNiverse editor-in-chief Karen Bannan spoke with Magnus-Aryitey, Co-Founder and Board Member of Code the Dream about her work bringing coding education to people of color and immigrants and creating CTD Labs, the organization’s in-house software development arm. Read why Code the Dream is so crucial to the future and what it looks like to put their version of public interest technology into practice. Read the full Q&A here.
Discovery
Opportunities and events from around the Network and beyond.
Network Events
Worcester Polytechnic Institute | TouchTomorrow 2021 | June 6-12 2021
Massachusetts Institute of Technology | EmTech Next 2021 | June 08, 2021 at 12:00pm to 5:00pm
New York University | Analytics Conference: Accelerating Equity and Inclusion Through Technology and Data | Friday, June 11, 2021 | 9:00am - 3:00pm EDT
University of Virginia | Analyzing Deep Neural Networks Using Attribution | June 15, 2021, 11:30am – 12:30pm
University of Michigan | 2021 International Symposium on Transportation Data and Modelling (ISTDM) | June 21, 2021
