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.