Events

  Lab Flood is presented by BetaNYC. About BetaNYC: BetaNYC is a civic organization dedicated to improving lives in New York through civic design, technology, and data. We believe that all New Yorkers should be able to access information and use technology as tools for public good. When communities are empowered with modern civic tools, residents […]

The Community Sensor Lab is a low cost air quality monitor and data network for NYC that seeks to equip youth and community members with research tools and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) skills to better advocate for local policy change on public health and environmental justice. The project mobilizes CUNY undergraduate and […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

  Planning with Parents Who Fear Deportation is an interactive demo of the “Planning with Parents” website presented by CUNY Law came about from a project started in 2017 by CUNY Law School alums, professors, students, and other advocates and activists to help undocumented parents plan for their children and families in response to the […]

  Our immigration system is broken, outdated, and overwhelmed. Families are being separated, and millions face deportation without legal help or reliable information. Pathfinder, Mobile Pathways’ newest AI-powered platform, helps immigration legal representatives access the fast facts that matter most. It transforms thousands of rows of government data into a clear, intuitive interface that simplifies […]

Life Project 4 Youth Alliance is a federation of 16 organizations in 13 countries whose aim is the development of innovative solutions for the comprehensive inclusion (professional and social) of young adults (18-24 years old) living in extreme poverty and suffering from exclusion. It implements professional and social skills training as well as contact between […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

Heat Complaints in NYC: Borough Focused Analysis from August ’23 to April ’25 is an interactive project that addresses two critical questions for those NYC residents who experience no-heat situations in their residences. Using elements of Tableau, this project determines 1) how different winter temperature patterns affect the number of complaints and 2) that there were […]

  The IlluminationSpace Hub Ecosystem Map: Civic Science in Action Analyzing the Impact of Emergent Informal STEM Learning Partnerships on Under-resourced Communities and Academic STEM Research is a project that presents outcomes of a Rita Allen Foundation Civic Science Fellowship, supporting an 18-month effort to research, analyze, and expand the ASRC IlluminationSpace Hub (IS Hub). The […]

Bed-Stuy 2125 is a speculative design project that imagines what Bedford-Stuyvestant could look like in 100 years. Against the backdrop of gentrification today, this project is meant to inspire creative, participatory, and culturally-informed ideas about the types of spaces and services that residents can build and demand to reflect the history and contributions of the […]

  Whether for pop-ups, concerts, trendy bakeries, or sneaker drops, whatisthislinefor.nyc addresses the uniquely NYC phenomenon of standing in long lines. The project is a real-time, community powered website that tracks queues: where people are gathering, how long they’re waiting, and what they’re waiting for. Lines are more than just means to access… in NYC they’re […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

  The Zine Lab is a collaborative community project between Missouri S&T and East Carolina University and funded by the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN). “Zines are world-making tools” and in the process of zine-making, “students make their ideas material while ensuring them a future, often for those whom our society harbors the most […]

Wiki.NYC Public Library Wiki-Kiosk is an installation that explores digital and tactile interaction with Wikipedia and other free knowledge platforms from a physical interface, particularly using outcomes of Wiki Gam Jam. Wiki.NYC Public Library Wiki-Kiosk is presented by Richard Knipel, CUNY Wikimedian-in-Residence, Wikimedia NYC.

  fomo.nyc is a free, community-built interactive map of upcoming events in NYC. It works by visiting the websites of parks, museums, music venues, etc., identifying any upcoming events, and displaying them on a map. The goal is for this to become a useful resource for people to find events they are interested in and […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

  AI Nightmares or Dreams? Students Design the Future is an interactive installation that emerges from deep listening with students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice about their lived experiences navigating AI in education. Rather than accepting the false choice between AI replacement or AI prohibition, we demonstrate AI as a “bridge technology” – filling […]

  New York Emotions: Live is a real-time civic installation that speculates on affective ecosystems, exploring how emotions shape society a macro and micro scale. Functioning as an emotional cartography of New York City, this system will passively collect data signals from public social platforms to infer emotions of the collective, while also collecting individuals […]

wholives.online is a web exhibit that explores different domains, underlying infrastructure, and mechanisms of the Internet from the POV of a nonhuman digital being (think webscrapers, bots, AI agents, LLMs, etc.) ⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅ Experience the Internet through the tentacles of a […]

Redact is a browser application that helps users protect identities in photos by detecting and obscuring faces and removing embedded metadata such as GPS, timestamps, and device data. It operates entirely on the user’s device—no images are uploaded or stored—so it can be used offline and with full privacy. The project addresses tensions between visual […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

Aging Out of Place is a participatory mahjong-inspired installation first selected for Data Through Design during NYC Open Data Week, later featured in Next City News, NYCxDesign Week, and presented in lectures at Northwestern. Using mahjong tiles—a symbol of connection but also a gateway into the gambling addiction among Chinatown elderly— this piece reconstructs a […]

  Mapping For Equity & Future of The Oculus is presented by BetaNYC. About BetaNYC: BetaNYC is a civic organization dedicated to improving lives in New York through civic design, technology, and data. We believe that all New Yorkers should be able to access information and use technology as tools for public good. When communities are […]

  Pooping is one of the most natural acts for all creatures; poop is a trace of what is consumed every day. However, in New York City, poop is more. It is everywhere and has become an unignorable icon of the city itself. If poop symbolizes NYC, how might we reimagine it in a creative […]

  ACE and the Race to Class: Improving Bus Speeds for CUNY Students investigates how New York City’s Automated Camera Enforcement (ACE) program can improve bus speeds and reduce chronic lateness for CUNY students. Using MTA bus data and machine learning models, we discovered that ACE implementation increases bus speeds by 10.1% on CUNY routes—yet […]

Co-op Ride is a driver-owned rideshare platform launched by The Drivers Cooperative in New York City to provide a community-based alternative to Uber and Lyft. Through the app, drivers earn more on each trip, and profits go back to drivers. The co-op is now launching a new platform, which can be used by riders to […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

Reinventing the Wheel: A Conversation in Future Retrospect is a participatory art/community activism project that will involve multi-modal efforts over the past 25 years to change paradigms of climate inaction. It will reinvent the conceptualization of technology to incorporate a wide array of tools, discourses, networks, methods. The project will inform a nuanced approach to […]

Body in Beta is a participatory AR installation that lets visitors see themselves through the logic of computer vision—while reclaiming that gaze as play. Using open-source facial-tracking and generative graphics, the work overlays dynamic “data masks” on participants’ faces that respond to micro-movements: a blink, a tilt, a smile. Each mask is uniquely generated and […]

Where is our agency in the age of algorithms? During this live, interactive performance lecture by Mengna Da, the audience can control the artist’s body via a custom web app on their phones. As the artist executes the commands in real time, she will simultaneously give a talk on agency in the contexts of data […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

  Hometown XR is an interactive project that explores the intersections of memory, identity, and technology by transforming digital traces into evolving audiovisual experiences. Drawing from large-scale web archives such as Common Crawl and incorporating audience participation, the project visualizes “hometown memories” through AI-generated imagery and sound. These memories are then reimagined in projection-based installations, […]

  Collective Atlas invites New Yorkers to map places in the city that matter to them, entirely from memory. These maps range from meticulous street grids to abstract gestures. Even when participants map the same place, the drawings reveal how differently we hold space in memory: what stands out, what fades, what stretches, or distorts. […]

Shining a Light on 3,000+ Massachusetts Police Records is an interactive demo of a front-end platform to house thousands of public records acquired by the ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project on policing and use of surveillance tech by government agencies. The database makes it possible to filter and search within these documents for […]

It’s Completely Anonymous (2024) is a participatory online platform where visitors slow down to answer the question left by the previous participant, and then leave a new question for the next person. Instead of profiles, metrics, or surveillance, the project creates an evolving chain of anonymous exchanges, really to be seen as an archive built through […]

At the Trustworthy, Intelligent, and Explainable Robotics (TIER) Lab, our mission is to develop robots for social good. We aim to design and develop robotic systems that not only intelligent and robust but also trustworthy, transparent, ethical, and inclusive. Our research is at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, machine learning, robotics, cognitive science, and ethics. The TIER lab was […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

WasteNotNYC is an interactive data experience that invites visitors to rethink the journey of their food waste through play and data storytelling. At a touchscreen kiosk, participants “build a meal” from a menu of options and are prompted to guess how much of it can be composted. The system then reveals the correct answer, compares […]

  Talk to the City (T3C) is an open-source deliberation platform that transforms large-scale public input into actionable insights. This session will demonstrate how thousands of voices—whether citizens in democratic innovation pilots, healthcare workers shaping bargaining strategies, or voters in Tokyo’s gubernatorial elections—can be synthesized into clear, collective agendas in real time. Drawing on case […]

  Mutual Vend is a decentralized, peer to peer 3D-printable vending machine network where every purchase earns you a share of the profits. Mutual Vend creates a self-sustaining, consumer-owned retail network through two simple principles: shared responsibility for stocking machines and shared rewards from every purchase. Consumers stake collateral to stock machines cooperatively, with other […]

Future of Sustainable Buildings: Plumbing Systems & Data for Resilience is a project that combines mechanical engineering and data science to demonstrate how plumbing and building systems impact sustainability, equity, and public health in cities like New York. The demo will feature an interactive visualization where visitors can simulate choices, such as upgrading plumbing systems, […]

Palumba NYC x WOTB is a simple app and website helping New Yorkers vote at the NYC Mayoral Elections. Based on the successful European experience of Palumba, which gathered nearly 200k users across 27 countries and was #1 in the App Store, this Tinder-style test matches you with the candidates that stand for your vision […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

  At the start of 2019, the MTA introduced a new technology with efforts to speed of bus routes in the NYC boroughs. The Bus Automated Camera Enforcement (ACE) system was implemented onto specific buses, eventually spreading onto buses across the five boroughs. Beyond the Bus: A Spatial and Socio-Economic Analysis of MTA Bus Violations […]

Turtles All the Way Down is a hands-on, audience-assisted live-coding demo using Turtle Geometry, a tool from MIT that was used to enable children as young as preschool to learn introductory coding and mathematical operations. The history of Turtle coding, which is rich and varied, touches all aspects of education reform in the US (successful […]

App Microscope is a tool to display the Internet Safety Labs safety label (ISL Safety Label) for mobile applications. The information in the ISL Safety Label is designed to highlight safety risks found in the app when using it as it was designed to be used. ISL calls these inherent risks “programmatic harms”. Most of the […]

Robot for Public Good: Empathy, Ethics, and Play in Human–Robot Interaction is an interactive demo exploring how robots can embody empathy, ethics, and community values while promoting emotional learning. Using an expressive, AI-driven robot, the installation invites visitors to experience how technology can model care, curiosity, and civic awareness. The demo highlights how robots can […]

UPchieve is a nonprofit edtech platform that provides 24/7 free, on-demand tutoring and college support for low-income students. The platform connects students with trained volunteer tutors in real time, so academic help is available whenever and wherever they need it. At the PIT Pop Up, visitors will see both sides of the experience. They can […]

Georgia State University’s Library Research Data Services (RDS) Department launched the Public Interest Data Literacy (PIDLit) Learning Lab, a grant-funded experiential learning course titled “Tackling Food Insecurity.” Offered in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, the course connected students with local organizations—Panther’s Pantry, Wholesome Wave Georgia, MARTA Markets, and ATLytiCS—to apply data skills toward addressing food […]

How can we use technology to change our city and the world for the better? Join us for an exclusive screening of Roadtrip Nation’s newest documentary “Tech for Us” + a Public Interest Tech conversation at City Tech! Check out the trailer below and RSVP here!  

Worlds We Carry is an interactive installation that invites the public to imagine what we should carry forward into the future, whether into space or here on Earth. Participants are invited to map the places that matter to them – from corner parks to neighborhood restaurants – and share what gives these spaces meaning. Each […]

YourPeer allows service-seekers to find free and low-cost social resources. It’s also a tool to help people assist others who could use those resources. YourPeer helps communities rebuild. Streetlives’ goal is to shorten the time it takes for youth (16-24) to transition from housing instability to being stably housed and thriving. YourPeer and Streetlives are […]

The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.