Research, Projects & Publications

Candid

Student Team: Zemin Cai, Harrison Jinglun Yu

Faculty Mentor: Shan Wang

Company Liaison: Cathleen Clerkin

Project Outcomes: Candid's Insights department engaged students in impactful research projects in data ethics. These projects included an examination of diversity, equity, and inclusion within nonprofits, an exploration of nonprofits' societal impact, and an investigation into real-time grantmaking data, particularly in relation to issues like racial equity. Students were tasked with identifying factors influencing organizations' willingness to share demographic data and analyzing data to predict nonprofits' societal impact. Additionally, they explored methodologies to provide real-time insights into philanthropic trends while addressing potential biases and confounding factors. These projects harnessed various data science techniques and underscored the importance of ethical considerations in data analysis.

Kidas Inc.

Student Team: Raghavendra Kommavarapu

Faculty Mentor: Mustafa Hajij

Company Liaison: Amit Yungman

Project Outcomes: Students optimized point-of-interest detection algorithms, including hate speech and sexual content detection, using data and metadata. They attempted age detection in audio and text, emotion detection in audio and text, and voice changer detection in audio. Additionally, they worked on displaying data visualizations on personal pages based on user activity and algorithm results using Python.

YLabs (Youth Development Labs)

Student Team: Tejaswi Dasari

Faculty Mentor: Diane Woodbridge

Company Liaison: Robert On

Project Outcomes: In the CyberRwanda project, focused on enhancing the well-being and prospects of urban teenagers through digital education, students used various technologies and techniques to measure project progress and effectiveness. They employed Google Analytics to track engagement metrics and designed KPI dashboards for automatic data generation. However, challenges included manual data tracking, discrepancies between Google Analytics versions, and gaps in tracking product pick-ups. Integrating and utilizing data from different sources for decision-making was identified as a crucial goal.

ACLU

Our Team: Joleena Marshall

Faculty Mentor: Michael Ruddy

Company Liaisons: Linnea Nelson, Tedde Simon, Brandon Greene

Project Outcomes: The team developed a tool with Python to acquire and preprocess publicly-available data related to the Oakland Unified School District to investigate whether or not OUSD’s allocation of resources results in inequities between schools. The team also provided an updated data analysis on educational outcomes for indigenous students for a select number of Humboldt County unified school districts, including data visualizations.

California Forward

Our Team: Evie Klaassen

Faculty Mentor: Michael Ruddy

Company Liaison: Patrick Atwater

Project Outcomes: The team built a tool with Python to determine where high wage jobs are located in California. This tool serves as an extension to current data tools created and maintained by the organization. The team also developed a pipeline to clean and prepare new public data when it is released, and for the tool’s outputs to be regularly updated given any new data.

ACLU Criminal Justice

Our Team: Qianyun Li

Goal: At the ACLU, the student identified potential discrimination in school suspensions by performing feature importance analysis with machine learning models and statistical tests.

ACLU Micromobility

Our Team: Max Shinnerl

Goal: At the ACLU, the student analyzed COVID-19 vaccine equitable distribution data. They developed interactive maps with Leaflet to visualize shortcomings of the distribution algorithm and automated the cleaning of legislative record data. They also developed a pipeline for storing data to enable remote SQL queries using Amazon RDS and S3 from AWS.

Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG)

Our Team: Bing Wang

Goal: At the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), Bing gleaned critical location of death information from unstructured text fields in Arabic using Google Translate and Python Pandas, adding identifiable records to Syrian conflict data. She wrote R scripts and bash Makefiles to create blocks of similar records on killings in the Sri Lankan conflict to reduce the size of search space in the semi-supervised machine learning record linkage (database deduplication) process.

Toward Realignment: Big Tech, Organized Labor, and the Politics of the Future of Workby, Nantina Vgontzas, Sage Journals

Affective Engagement in #StopAAPIHate on Social Media: The Role of Emotion in Driving Engagement for Counter-hate Content on Twitter, USF CRASE Blog

• “Inside DeepMind's Secret Plot to Break Away From Google”, Business Insider
• “Social Media Content Moderation Is Not Neutral, USF Researcher Says”, SF Public Press
• “How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you”, Technology Review
• "To Live in Their Utopia: Why Algorithmic Systems Create Absurd Outcomes" by Ali Alkhatib at [CHI 2021] - also available as a video summary on YouTube
• "The politicization of face masks in the American public sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic" by Scoville, C., McCumber, A., Amironesei R., Jeon, J. at the American Sociological Association
• "On the Genealogy of Machine Learning Datasets: A Critical History of ImageNet" by Denton, E., Hanna, A., Amironesei, R., Smart, A., Nicole, H. at Big Data and Society
• "Notes on Problem Formulation" by Amironesei, R., Denton, E., Hanna, A. at IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Journal
• "Algorithmic Conservation in a Changing Climate" by Scoville, C., Chapman, M., Amironesei, R., and Boettiger, C. at Current Opinion in Sustainability Journal
• "'You Can’t Sit With Us': Exclusionary Pedagogy in AI Ethics Education" by Raji, I.D., Scheuerman, M.K., Amironesei, R. at FAccT
• "Genealogy, Archeology, Hermeneutics: Techniques of Interpretation in Machine Learning Datasets," by Amironesei, R., Denton, E., Hanna, A. at [IEEESSIT]
• "Bringing the People Back In: Contesting Benchmark Machine Learning Datasets" by Denton, E., Hanna, A., Amironesei, R., Smart, A., Nicole, H., Scheuerman, M.K. at arXiv

• “The Dark Side of Big Tech’s Funding for AI Research”
• “Google workers reject company's account of AI researcher's exit as anger grows”
• “Is your boss spying on you while you work remotely?”
• “Open Letters by Tech Industry, Google Employees Criticize Google’s Lack of Transparency in AI Research”
• "Bridging Data Science with Ignatian Spirituality"