Author: Kathleen

In order to support our mission to make technology as widely accessible and broadly equitable as possible, CUNY PIT Lab is proud to have convened our inaugural advisory board.

Brought together with the invaluable guidance of founding board chair Brendon Hawkins, these six individuals will aid in our aims of building workplace and learning pathways for students, fostering cross-sector collaboration across non-profit and civic tech organizations, and continuing to create community-engaged research initiatives.

Meet our advisory board:

• Brendon Hawkins (founding chair) is a social technologist and systems researcher focused on modeling emotion as measurable infrastructure. He is the founder of Studio Lab BH, a systems research lab currently developing computational frameworks for understanding how affect shapes human behavior, culture, and digital environments. His work spans AI/ML product development, data systems, and interdisciplinary research.

• Katie Bailey is Senior Director at HearstLab, where she works with founders, investors, and industry leaders to help scale startups addressing real-world challenges. Over the past decade, she has led initiatives spanning product, innovation, strategy, and business development across Hearst’s B2B software and venture businesses. A longtime advocate for technology as a force for positive impact, Katie is particularly interested in how technology, entrepreneurship, and human-centered design can improve outcomes for individuals and communities.

• Seon Britton is a student in the PhD sociology program at CUNY’s Graduate Center, where he studies community organizations. He is currently working on his dissertation which focuses on community technology centers and how they utilize technology for community development. His work employs an ethnographic approach to see how organizations work across fields in fighting for digital equity.

• Renata Gerecke serves as an AI Policymaker within New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), where they lead initiatives focused on algorithmic accountability, transparency and responsible AI adoption across city agencies. In this role, Renata oversees the city’s Algorithms Management and Reporting framework and contributes to policy guidance shaping how AI and automated decision systems are evaluated and deployed in public operations.

• Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, artist & cyberethnographer based in new york city. He is a professor of design and media studies at NYU. His work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology and the implications of being-on-line. He writes about virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence. His work and research have been presented and published in journals, magazines, and conferences all over the world. He is the author of the books “A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints” and “A Few Essays of Taste” (Metalabel’s 2025 zine of the year). He is the founder of 13101401 inc,  a design and research studio.

• Renée Westmoreland is a digital and UX leader for the social sector. Her career is focused on creating digital experiences for mission-driven audiences — work centered on transforming complexity into clarity, turning data and information into elegant, intuitive experiences that people can easily navigate and trust. As Senior Director of UX at Candid, Renée managed user experience for SaaS platforms and digital resources, and led the design process for unifying multiple legacy platforms into a single product serving millions of nonprofit professionals, as well as the development of digital solutions providing news and education to the social sector.

We will be highlighting each of our advisory board members on our blog beginning next week – make sure to return to our website to read more.

Presently, the CUNY Public Interest Technology Lab is continuing to grow in capacity and expand opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners. We’re thrilled to announce the appointment of two new Associate Directors to help us advance our vision. Effective immediately, we are welcoming Raj Korpan (Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Hunter College) as Associate Director of Research and Community Engagement, and Nate Cooper (Lecturer, UX Design Concentration, Kingsborough Community College) as Associate Director of PIT Workforce Development and Experiential Learning.

This summer, Raj will lead the development of public-facing critical AI workshops with CUNY students teams at the NYC PIT Pop Up.  Nate will be collaborating with the PIT Lab on building a studio-lab course in Human-Centered Design for Public Interest Technology.

We spoke to Raj and Nate about these exciting developments in CUNY PIT Lab’s ability to execute its continuing mission of making technology equitable, sustainable, safe, and accessible to all.

Can you say a little bit about what you foresee for yourselves in your new Associate Director roles?

RAJ KORPAN: I’m really excited to have a closer formal relationship with the PIT lab. We’ve been working together in various degrees over the last year, but to have it formalized as an associate director position is great. My role is to spearhead some of the research that we want to do around public interest technology through community engagement. I think that there’s not a lot of research that has been done that explores how public-facing, community-engaged kinds of spaces improve the public’s awareness of technology, particularly of AI and robotics. And so we want to do some research on how we can run events, different types of engagement activities, workshops, and so on, that engage the community, engage the public, and hopefully teach them about AI, about robotics, about technology, development, while still centering this public interest lens.

NATE COOPER: The last ten, fifteen years of my work I’ve looked at education through the lens of what in CUNY they often call career connected learning. I have this background where I think education should help students get into meaningful careers and find pathways into opportunities for jobs and just getting the life that they want. Education helps unlock opportunities for people and it helps to get them where they need to be. In my professional life, I’ve been very invested in technology that is civically engaged, civic-minded, thinking about how it helps people. And I met Katie [Cumiskey, executive director of CUNY PIT Lab] through some of these circles around career-connected learning and the impact of AI on jobs and education. And so coming to CUNY PIT Lab, it just feels like it’s a natural fit for the kinds of stuff I find really rewarding about what CUNY is good at, which is: providing opportunities for students and thinking through the lens of job outcomes in a way that is connected to the community strongly. CUNY is New York City, you know?

Raj, how has your experience in the field of robotics given you insights into the future of AI and how AI can be developed ethically?

RK: Great question. My lab, the Trustworthy Intelligent, Explainable Robotics Lab (TIER Lab), we really focus on two big areas of research. One is more on systems and algorithms, a lot more of the technical AI and robotics research. And then the other side is more on the human interaction, human impact of these systems. My PhD was very much on the AI side, and we developed a system for robots to navigate and explore indoor spaces and environments and tried to build something that was able to kind of emulate human intelligence as it relates to navigation and wayfinding.

As I moved into a full-time faculty role, I went back to thinking about my goals and my values and what it is that I want to really focus on as a faculty member. And to me, it was really important to evolve my direction towards more kind of human-centered research, to really focus on: how do these systems actually impact people? How do we build systems for people in our communities? So that was where I came to, and then I started kind of branching out further to think about communities interacting with these kinds of systems. And that’s where I think a lot of the research on public interest tech, AI literacy, data literacy [is going]: how do we use these systems to actually support specific communities?

Nate, you’ve described your work with CUNY PIT Lab as an effort to help “shape the digital infrastructure of public life.” How does your experience in UX inform your approach to that problem?

NC: Human-centered design really is just problem solving, putting the user first. So, I might understand a problem from the perspective of how I see that problem, but it’s not going to be solved if [we] don’t understand who I’m solving that problem for, or how they are affected. And that includes being aware of biases and all kinds of constraints, like accessibility and things like that. But if you’re only looking at things in little chunks of isolation, there’s this bigger institutional challenge where it’s like, okay, well, we can build a really great tax portal, but then, for example, the food benefits portal doesn’t work with it, you know? They don’t talk to each other. So UX is about problem solving, understanding the problem. Design affects interfaces, it affects architecture, it affects processes and communication. So there’s all these different pieces. And if you’re only tackling those individually, you’re not really solving the bigger problems.

Sonic Spaces is a new series taking place at NYC PIT Pop Up exploring the mediums of sound and music, and looking into how they inform our ideas around community, communication, and commodification.

All of these events are free and open to the public.

On Sunday April 19th at 2pm, Aurelie Barbier (Space to the People) will be presenting Sounds of Earth, a transatlantic experiment in which Berlin-based opera singer Lola Volonakis performs live in dialogue with her AI double in New York. Using high-resolution vocal modeling, the performance uses AI to reinterpret fragments of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (one of the musical selections NASA sent to represent humanity in 1977), challenging notions of authorship, replication, and cultural heritage. This performance will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with Barbier, Volonakis, and Camille JeanJean (Villa Albertine). The event will allow for a limited in-person capacity and will be livestreamed. RSVP here to attend.

On Monday April 20th at 6pm, writer/educator/DJ Todd Craig will be in dialogue with Chenjerai Kumanyika to celebrate the audiobook release of his recent book K for the Way. Craig’s book establishes and investigates the function of DJ rhetoric and literacy, illuminating the DJ as a fruitful example for (re)envisioning approaches to writing, research, and analysis in contemporary educational settings. Because it is widely recognized that the DJ was the catalyst for the creation of Hip Hop culture, this book begins a new conversation in which Hip Hop DJs introduce ideas about poetics and language formation through the modes, practices, and techniques they engage in on a daily basis. The event will allow for a limited in-person capacity and will be livestreamed. RSVP here to attend.

On Wednesday April 22nd, author Liz Pelly will be joined by moderator Jeff Tobias to discuss her recent book Mood Machine, which takes a critical look at the rise of Spotify, the data surveillance company masquerading as a music streaming platform. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed. The event will allow for a limited in-person capacity and will be livestreamed. RSVP here to attend.

On Friday April 24th, artists Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere will host a day-length audio installation at the pop up that will capture and recontextualize radio frequencies from areas inside and immediately surrounding the Oculus. The local airwaves will be sourced and recombined into a sound piece exploring the overlapping textures communicated across Lower Manhattan re-articulating the invisible and omnipresent frequencies used by municipal agencies.

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are interdisciplinary artists whose practice spans over twenty years of projects that actuate music and sound, radio, dissent, and the cultural complexities of the public sphere. The artists have produced works in video installation, lyric writing, performance, and photography. Their research interests lie in the intersection between music, civic action, and historical moments that resonate through distinct musical instrumentation and sonorous traditions. This installation will be freely accessible to visitors at the pop up from 12pm-6pm throughout the day, no RSVP necessary.

CUNY PIT Lab is excited to announce that we are convening our inaugural advisory board. This board will serve to broaden our impact as a site aimed at advancing public interest technology. We will be inviting individuals who have a track record in:

• Building career opportunities and credentialing in the civic, non-profit and/or academic sector
• Producing high-impact media and production campaigns
• Driving inclusion and equity in tech
• Supporting cross-sector and transdisciplinary approaches to using, building, and understanding technology

To help shape and lead our inaugural advisory board, Brendon Hawkins will be serving as the founding advisory board chairperson for CUNY PIT Lab. Brendon is a social technologist and systems researcher focused on modeling emotion as measurable infrastructure. He is the founder of Studio Lab BH, a systems research lab currently developing computational frameworks for understanding how affect shapes human behavior, culture, and digital environments. His work spans AI/ML product development, data systems, and interdisciplinary research. This work results in the translation of emotional signals into structured, designable systems at the intersection of science, technology, and culture.

Along with our team, Brendon will be helping to gather individuals from across the broader public interest technology community to convene an advisory board that will serve to guide CUNY PIT Lab’s work in the future. We spoke to Brendon about what draws him to public interest tech and what he hopes to bring to this new advisory board.

What excites you about public interest technology?

I’m a little bit of a semantic nerd. As the lines become blurred around so much of what is becoming our societal reality — disinformation, misinformation, correct information inundated in a space of misinformation — I have to question everything that I’m approached with or that I approach. So when I hear public interest technology, I have to break down all those words separately and then join them back together.

When I think of the public, I think of it in this kind of fractal kind of experience: myself as the public and my own personal interests; my immediate circle – friends, family, partner – as part of the public that sits outside of myself. Then there is maybe my neighborhood, and then so on and so forth, right? And this concept of public kind of keeps augmenting itself the further globalization manifests in every component of the globe.

And I’m interested in that public part, specifically around what we do [to] layer our work so it impacts every layer of the public. So we don’t forget about those who may be five layers away from our immediate proximity versus those who are the most immediate to us.

Which then impacts interests: every layer will have different interests. Every layer will have a different set of values. Values abstract as we augment the amount of voices that are embedded in the question of values and interests. So as we’re working towards defining our sense of public, I’m really interested in understanding how we come to terms around interests — and whose interests get prioritized. And are there ways in which we don’t have to prioritize certain voices over others?

And then the concept of technology. Technology is everything that humans have contributed to within the world that sits outside of things that the world did not create on its own within this thing that we call the Anthropocene. In this context, we are specifically talking about digital technologies, social digital technologies, infrastructural digital technologies. And when we layer all of that up with those two other terms, I’m most fascinated about, again: we have a large public. CUNY has a responsibility in many ways to the folks of New York City. Though, if history has taught us anything, New York City is a great testament to what will occur across the world.

So with that level of responsibility, I’m curious to understand how we can take on the responsibility of defining, respecting, and engaging with an augmented sense of public. Defining, respecting, and engaging with an augmented sense of value across that public. And then tying all of that to these digital technologies.

What sort of perspectives or experience do you hope to bring to your role as advisory board chair?

Katie [Cumiskey]’s running a really unique ship. Civic technology exists, government technology exists, public technology exists, but again, this interest part is so fascinating to me, because it really does suggest that there is a value prop, a real value prop, to prioritizing the interest and values of what we consider to be our public. And that’s a hefty duty. When we were crafting this role, what we wanted to outline was: given that this lab is taking on such a duty, what does that look like across time? Not just in this moment, but a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. And as we work towards all of that, what are some of the things that we will need?

Most exciting for this advisory chair is that strategy. And this is the skill set that has been most lucrative for me in my experience: the ability to see where we want to go, and then finding the pieces to bring all of that together. Being able to strategize for us now, when we are in this kind of nexus of public awareness of the lab that includes political awareness, general public awareness, as well as advancements in our own understanding of where we want the lab to go.

Being able to strategize now so that everything is intentional as we move over the next few years — it’s quite exciting.
I think the thing that has been most valuable outside of my strategy is my perspective. I come from different angles of prior experience: I’m educated in cybersecurity, experientially trained in machine learning and AI, and then personally trained in art and design. And being able to combine those points of view is one of the things that will be one of the more valuable components of what I’m bringing to this chair position.

Nate Cooper is a professor of UX and product design at Kingsborough College, and brings a vast range of experience in both the private and public sectors to his role there. This past October, Nate helped to launch the NYC-based iteration of NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, a weekend-long hackathon that brought together developers, designers, scientists, students, and community builders to tackle real-world problems using open data from NASA and other global partners.

This Tuesday, March 24th, Nate will be hosting the Space Apps Challenge Showcase at NYC PIT Pop Up as part of Open Data Week. The winning teams from this recent hackathon will be showcasing the award-winning projects they developed based on NASA’s open data, joined by a few of the judges and mentors who helped them along the way.

We spoke to Nate to get more information about Space Apps Challenge and learn more about what visitors can expect to find at the pop up next week. Click here for the rest of the schedule at CUNY Open Data Takeover at NYC PIT Pop Up!

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, can you explain what a hackathon is?

A hackathon is usually a 3-day event, although there can be one-day hackathons. The idea is it’s time-boxed, and the goal is to build something within a short span of time, and that “something” can take different shapes. Usually a hackathon has a theme, like: we want to work on a fintech product, or there’s ones that are more business-focused, like Startup Weekend.

For the NASA Space Apps Challenge, the theme is obviously data from NASA, and the goal is to build one of 11 challenges. And when we say build, again, that can be a little bit different depending on the event, but usually there’s a design, technology, [or] storytelling component. 

[During] a hackathon you’re given a challenge, you’re given a very limited time to build something during that challenge period. Forming a team is usually a big component of it as well. Your team has to present what they’ve built, and then there’s awards or some ceremony at the end to give people recognition for doing something crazy, like building an app in 3 days, which is a lot of work.

Usually, in hackathons, you don’t know people coming in, so it’s a great way to learn teamwork and meet people and just do really challenging, interesting things in a time box fashion.

Can you give us a sense of the range of fields that people might be coming from to join something like the Space AppsShowcase?

I’ve been a hackathon organizer for many years — I’m doing a hackathon that’s part of Open Data Week, a mini hackathon, it’s like a 3-hour one.

But the thing about the NASA Space Apps Challenge is that it’s very broad. As I said, they give you 11 challenges. Some of them are literally: build a lesson plan, or build a deck.

Some of them are, like, build a game. And others are more sophisticated, like: build a piece of software that does X, Y, or Z. So, again, it kind of depends on the hackathon.

NASA, by mandate, all of their data is open source. So, when they do a mission, or when they do a particular project, whatever data that gets generated from that has to be publicly available. And the reason they do this hackathon is a way to engage the public, because they’re like, hey, there’s all this data that exists. It’d be cool to see what people do with it.

And so I think people get into this vision, if you’ve never done a hackathon before, it sounds like a bunch of coders drinking Coke all night and staying up, you know, coding. And that does happen! I’m not gonna say it doesn’t happen, but I think that hackathons like the Space Apps Challenge, it’s also about creative output, people who have business, data analytics backgrounds. There was a variety of things that came out, especially the game stuff. There’s a few challenges that are game-related, and those are always really fun because it’s kind of interesting and creative.

Can you talk about some of the guests who will be speaking at the event?

Micah Acinapura works at the American Museum of Natural History, and he runs the planetarium shows. He runs this software called Open Space, which is an open-source software that anybody can download and use to build data visualizations based upon NASA and other data.

And we’ll also be joined by Aiden Feldman. What I asked him to do was to kind of demonstrate how you can use open data to build software at a hackathon, so he has a little presentation he’s gonna do; kind of more like a demonstration of the kind of thing people do at the hackathon.

Space Apps Showcase will take place at NYC PIT Pop Up on Tuesday, March 24th from 2:00pm-6:00pm. More information found here.

From March 23–27th 2026, CUNY PIT Lab will be showcasing a week of workshops, demonstrations, and interactive presentations at NYC PIT Pop Up as part of Open Data Week!

For the past decade, New Yorkers have come together across the five boroughs each March to celebrate public data in New York City and mark the anniversary of the City’s first open data law. Co-organized and presented by NYC Open Data Team at the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), BetaNYC, and Data Through Design, Open Data Week is an opportunity for New Yorkers to better understand their city through the work being done by NYC’s civic tech and open data communities.

As NYC PIT Pop Up continues to showcase how technology can serve the public good at its location in the South Concourse of the iconic Oculus/World Trade Center, Open Data Week will serve as the space’s second major activation  following its successful eleven-day launch in fall of 2025. During this week, projects from CUNY as well as the wider PIT community will be shared through interactive demos, data visualizations, and short, plain-language explanations designed for non-expert audiences, while remaining meaningful for practitioners and policymakers.

In addition to featured demos, the space will function as a collaborative open data studio, where project teams can troubleshoot works-in-progress, receive feedback on data storytelling and visualization, and offer mini-demos of open tools that support open data research and communication. As always, we will engage with our livestream community via Twitch throughout the week as each demo will be streamed live from the pop up.

CUNY Open Data Takeover at NYC PIT Pop Up will be open to the public each day from 2pm to 6pm. Keep an eye on our website for scheduling announcements in the coming weeks!