Led by Latanya Sweeney and the Data Privacy Lab at IQSS, the Technology Science Research Network held its first workshop to identify and explore technological solutions to civil issues.
The Workshop on Problems in the Public Interest met for the first time at Harvard in January. This is the first of a series of workshops to come over the course of 18 months, during which Data Privacy Lab director Latanya Sweeney aims to "engage with civil society and government agencies to articulate problem statements that seem solvable by researchers." In the January workshop, participants identified the problems that they would solve with technology in the next several months.
As a part of the process of problem identification, participants discussed and submitted problem statements, which were then posted around the workshop space on the following day. Participants were then invited to consider the statements and placed their votes, using stickers to mark which ones they thought were worth pursuing and which were not. Topics considered included personal data privacy; consumer protection; open government data sharing; and the impact of such issues on disadvantaged communities.
Latanya Sweeney is Professor of Government and Technology in Residence and director of the Data Privacy Lab at the Institute for Quanitative Social Science. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Technology Science and former Chief Technology Officer at the US Federal Trade Commission. Her work aims to create and use technology to assess and solve societal, political, and governance problems, and to teach others how to do the same.
