Author: Kathleen

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been taking a look at the members of CUNY PIT Lab’s inaugural advisory board: six individuals brought together to help strengthen our capacity and continue to pursue our mission of making technology accessible, sustainable, and equitable for all.

This week, we spoke to renata gerecke. renata works on responsible technology adoption, with a focus on AI, at the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation. She produces NYC’s algorithmic tool registry, which is one of the most comprehensive and long-standing reports on public sector AI use. We spoke to renata about her path in the fields of data science, public policy, and govtech.

Can you give us a sense of your backstory and how you got interested in the work you’re doing now?

I was originally a math major in undergrad, but I had a lot of interest in public policy, even though I didn’t know to call it that. I didn’t really understand public policy as a field. I graduated from college, and I became a data scientist at a market research firm working with a lot of survey data, and also was witnessing this burgeoning data science and data analytics movement. I was interested in the growth of R, in particular as a coding language, and predictive analytics.

I loved the work that I was doing in market research, but I wanted to do more than sell a product, and wanted to work on things that had a more tangible impact and were addressing policy questions that I had been exposed to through extracurricular work I did in college. And so I ended up going back to NYU to get my Masters of Science in Public Policy from NYU Wagner, where I was really trying to learn about how that field was using quantitative methods to address policy issues. While I was doing that, I got a role at the Mayor’s Office of Operations working on vaccine rollout for COVID — this was in 2021. I was really interested in the ways that data and data science algorithms and nascent technology work as a part of city government and who was doing that work. One of the great things about interning is that you get to talk to a ton of people — and even though it was all remote, people were happy to talk to me, and New York City is really a bastion of folks who think about data in all kinds of different contexts. So I got to talk to folks who were on the information privacy team and who were really focused on thinking about personal data, how the city collects that information, how they store that information, and how they act as good stewards for that information.

And I also learned about algorithmic tools reporting, which is sort of at the nexus of everything that I was interested in without even knowing it existed. I started working full-time at the city in 2021, and it’s totally transformed with the introduction of generative AI tools. And it’s interesting: government by its nature is a slow adopter and broadly speaking, you can say a lot about the pains of bureaucracy, but I think that mostly it’s a good thing. It would be bad for public trust if the interface for your benefits platform was changing with every iteration of JavaScript. So in some ways, the antiquated nature of our technology can be helpful, because it needs to be stable, it has to work, and it has to work the same way every time. And that is not at all what AI tools that are currently on the market can promise! But there’s also a lot of potential. And so I spend a lot of time now thinking about how to help agencies… understand these tools and figure out how to use them in a way that improves access to services, or de-duplicates work, or creates meaningful automation, but does not compromise trust.

In your opinion, how do we “create the internet we want to see”?

Well, you have to define “what is the internet you want to see”! And people are going to disagree about what that is, because our needs are so diverse, right? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I will say that if we’re going to answer it, you need a really wide and invested group of stakeholders. To tie it back to the CUNY PIT Lab, you need people who are aware and excited about technology, who are coming together from all parts of the community. You need folks who are from every marginalized background. You need folks from different religious cultures, from different age groups, from different abilities — accessibility is a huge footnote on the internet sometimes. And getting more people excited about the potential of technology and focused on what they can build is more interesting to me than chasing away all the parts that are bad. And I think that’s a huge area of potential for the CUNY PIT Lab: harnessing that excitement and interest and giving people touchpoints with these new things, so that more people join that conversation.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been taking a look at the members of CUNY PIT Lab’s inaugural advisory board: six individuals brought together to help strengthen our capacity and continue to pursue our mission of making technology accessible, sustainable, and equitable for all.

This week, we spoke to Ruby Justice Thelot, a designer, artist & cyberethnographer based in New York City. He is a professor of design and media studies at NYU whose work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology and the implications of being-on-line. He writes about virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence, and 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.

In your lecture “Why Are There No New Aesthetics?”, you say: “To build new mass aesthetics we need a shared vision of the future and a philosophy.” So much of what eventually comes to dominate culture often starts in subcultural or countercultural forms. Do you think it’s important in itself to have “mass aesthetics”?

It is important, insofar as we believe that having a shared vision of the future is important for nation building. Now, what do I mean by this? Part of the underlying belief is that some monoliths are good. Some monoliths, culturally, allow us to share common cultural ground. They allow us to see what the nation will become, the path it can take, the future we want to build for our constituents, our children, our grandchildren. Today, you can kind of feel conflicting visions of the future. Before the lecture, the students had read this essay of mine called Mining the Future that I wrote for Art Forum, in which I describe how the monocultural events of a movie like Star Wars aligned a generation of future technologists into building some of the things that they saw in those movies. Famously, Mark Zuckerberg read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; that became a vision of the future he wanted to build with his company, formerly known as Facebook, [which he] then called Meta for “Metaverse,” because that book, which was science fiction, led him to want to build that vision of the future. And so I think that political conversation is very important as we’re making these foundationally important decision as to what technologies we will build. Who gets to build it? Who gets to own it? Right now, we are at a pivotal moment with AI. And we’re faced with something that could be highly transformational. And the fact that we do not have a shared vision of the future, I think, is causing a lot of fraughtness around the technology, because we don’t know whether that technology will be used for curing cancer, or taking away jobs from my family who lives in Georgia. Is the future one of total automation, where the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few tech oligarchs? Or is the future one where the spoils of this incredible, extraordinary technology do get not trickled down, but passed around to the whole of Americans. And that, in itself, is a decision as to what [kind of] future we want. And that future is promulgated, it’s disseminated, through mass aesthetics. There can be conflicting ones, and that’s always happened. But having that allows us to align and know what we are building for the future.

A recent focus of your work and discussions has been that of “slop,” and you also point towards “machinic taste”: “a phenomenon where digital content is increasingly shaped by non-human preferences rather than human desire.” Here’s a quote from you: “We are witnesses to a wonderful waltz between audience capture, algorithmic capture and machine capture.” What do you think are the negative or positive impacts this has on culture?

Well, the first one is this bit of a morbid curiosity: what do automated systems do when left on their own behalf? What are their aesthetic proclivities? And what do they make? And as I said in the essay, we’re seeing it with the slop. I think the reason why it’s so strange is because it’s not really meant for us. It’s kind of meant for us, because we’re still part of that “waltz,” but we’re slowly being eclipsed. And once we are truly eclipsed, then I’m genuinely curious to see what kind of weird, truly strange things we see. I think we learn a lot about the values of these systems as we see the kind of images they produce. It’s gonna reveal a lot of what [they] want to be rewarded by — I don’t want to say the word “want,” but… what they’re rewarded by as a part of their automated system.

The second thing is, as we stop relying on these recommendation systems, my sense is [that] there’s a reversal. Once you get to the point [where] you feel like you’re no longer seeing recommendations made by humans, then you return to your neighbor, you know? To me, there’s a hyper-locality that steps in. You start to take a look at your neighbor: you ask them, what’s their blender? Instead of going on a TikTok where maybe half of the likes and half of the comments are bots. But if Amelia likes her blender, maybe I’ll get the same one. And so we go back to what I’ve been calling a more tribal, more oral way of defining aesthetic affiliation or purchase decisions: all things that were very much influenced by the algorithm. As the algorithm gets further and further away from us, we need to find new modes of understanding the cultural space, and therefore we go back, in my opinion, to our neighbor. This is a process I call hyper-local global skepticism. The more things are on the platform, the more things are doubted: is this AI-generated, is this AI-influenced? Is this real, generally? Then the global, the thing that is macro, the thing that is big, gets doubted. That becomes a new epistemological route. That’s how we build knowledge, through tribal modes, oral modes, local modes.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the members of CUNY PIT Lab’s inaugural advisory board: six individuals brought together to help strengthen our capacity and continue to pursue our mission of making technology accessible, sustainable, and equitable for all. 

This week, we spoke to Katie Bailey. 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. She holds a degree in Urban & Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia and serves on the UVA School of Architecture Dean’s Advisory Board.

What is the background you’re bringing to this and what do you hope to bring to the board?

I work for a corporate venture team that invests in early stage technology startups. Obviously, when you approach technology with the lens of venture, it’s about making money and getting return on investment. What I have had the fortune of experiencing and seeing firsthand and proving out as a thesis is that you can do well and do good. So we have companies in our portfolio making millions and millions of dollars, but also fundamentally changing the foundation of local economies, of women’s health, of the future of infrastructure for the electric grid. And so I am especially excited to bring that business perspective, best practices, even bringing some of our portfolio companies to the forefront as real living examples of scalable business technology being applied toward making communities better.

Given the extremely dynamic and frequently disrupted state of tech, how can one best keep an eye to the horizon and try to anticipatethe unknowns, the corners that we’ve yet to turn?

I think that is the ultimate question. I think one thing that we try to stay true to our core about is: you know the technology is always going to be evolving and changing, but at the end of the day, I think it really comes down to two things. One being: what problem are you solving for, and is it a real problem? In our case: is it a problem that people are willing to pay to solve? And then second of all is, is this the right team to solve it? So we put a lot of emphasis on the founder, the founding team, the people behind the technology, just as much as the technology itself. A lot of people have access to AI, a lot of people can build apps these days, but if they don’t have the right sort of core expertise, if they don’t know about the industries they’re building for, they’re not going to get very far. And so I think those are two things we continue to double down on, even as technology modes are changing pretty rapidly.

AI is making a huge impact on work and on emerging careers. Do you see any industries that are potentially able to absorb these new technologies while stillremaining robust?

I think there are a few! One thing that we’re seeing that I think is actually quite interesting is the renaissance of “IRL.” There’s so much noise about technology — people are on screens and devices everywhere all the time. So we’re actually seeing a lot of interest and pullback to the human connection, and so I’m interested to see specifically how that plays out, especially for younger generations who have seen the older generations kind of mess that up. So I’m actually pretty optimistic that the answer for the future is somewhere in the middle of having technology as a partner to help accelerate good solutions, but at the end of the day, human judgment and humans still sort of in charge. I tend to lean towards a future vision where technology and humans actually work together instead of [being] replaced.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the members of CUNY PIT Lab’s inaugural advisory board: six individuals brought together to help strengthen our capacity and continue to pursue our mission of making technology accessible, sustainable, and equitable for all. 

This week, we spoke to Renée Westmoreland. Renée is a senior UX and digital leader inspired by design that works. 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.

At Candid, Renée managed user experience for SaaS platforms and digital resources, leading a team of designers, researchers, instructional designers, and editors. She 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. She co-led the development of the Candid brand and its launch when Foundation Center and GuideStar joined forces in 2019. At Foundation Center, she oversaw the design and development of numerous websites, including Foundation Directory, Philanthropy News Digest, and a series of issue-based sites illustrating the vital work of philanthropy.

Renée first connected with nonprofit work in high school as a volunteer for a therapeutic riding program and began her professional career at GMHC — the nation’s largest service organization for people living with HIV/AIDS — where she launched the organization’s first website. Renée holds a B.S. in Advertising from the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and serves on the boards of WebServes and the CUNY PIT Lab.

What are you hoping to contribute in your new role on our advisory board?

The first part is understanding how the advisory board can help. I’ve worked in the nonprofit sector for my whole career and in technology in nonprofit sector for most of it. So for me, I’m interested in understanding what projects can be created or executed that help to democratize access to technology. There’s a lot that is obviously changing in technology very rapidly with AI. But the sort of fundamental access to technology for nonprofits and the people that they serve remains a challenge, because technology is such an enormous piece of communication and news; the use of technology in the distribution of accurate information is an area that’s really important to me.

You were in charge of the design of Candid Learning website, which is incredibly impressive! How has your experience in UX taught you about how design can influence the way that people learn, and the way that people develop their skills?

That’s something that has evolved a lot. My first experience working with online learning was probably back in the early 2000s, with the first implementation. I oversaw several iterations of our learning website. The first original one was something called GrantSpace that evolved into Candid Learning. But as we chose a new platform for our learning, the need arose from the evolution of learning management systems. This is sort of inside baseball, but a lot of learning systems, the core of them is actually designed for HR training requirements. And what we learned was that that’s not the learning model that we were following, right? So, over time, those applications have evolved to become distinct in terms of the different kinds of learning that they’re trying to achieve. And ours was much more akin to customer education. So part of our goals with the redesign was helping nonprofits understand the concepts that would help them with sustainability, writing proposals, getting grants, and then also using our products to help them do that. So product education was a piece of it, but part of the evolution was out of our hands. Part of it happened during COVID, where everything moved online, and the amount of in-person training reduced dramatically, and people really gravitated towards online learning and on-demand learning in particular. That process evolved to contain highly engaging, small chunks of content that people could work their way through, and then also ways of actually tracking progress, so that people felt like they’re making their way through something to achieve a particular goal.

How do you manage an ongoing educational program given the current dynamic rate of change in technology?

Some of it is [about] understanding SEO. For example, one of the elements of the learning site was a knowledge base [that] had grown to over 200 questions, and with the new site, we brought it back down around 150. We worked with our marketing team on this, because we recognized that Google is going to extract all of that learning information and they’re going to deliver it in their search results. So it could be that those people, if they’re looking for, like, how do I do X, right? If we develop those articles that are a complete library, it’s searchable, they can go on the site and they can do it, but it’s a very likely scenario that they’re gonna ask the question on Google. And then Google is going to take the content from those pages and throw up the answers in their AI summary. And so making sure that we’re creating the content and the search engine optimization at the same time, so that it’s very well-formed for people to use on the site, but that it can also be extracted by AI and the search engines.

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 works on responsible technology adoption, with a focus on AI, at the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation. She produces NYC’s algorithmic tool registry, which is one of the most comprehensive and long-standing reports on public sector AI use. She has previously worked for the Mayor’s Office of Operations, and as a data scientist for a market research firm. She has a M.S. in Public Policy from NYU Wagner School of Public Service and a B.A. in Mathematics from Pomona College. Outside of the office, she loves supporting the New York Liberty and watching a good movie.

• 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!