Public Interest Technology at UMass Announces 2026-27 PIT Faculty Fellows
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The Public Interest Technology Initiative (PIT) at UMass has announced that 11 faculty members have been selected as PIT Faculty Fellows for 2026-27, including Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Assistant Professors Anna Green and Madeline Endres.
The PIT Faculty Fellowship focuses on building public interest-focused interdisciplinary community to explore PIT questions and integrative solutions. Faculty projects are aimed at addressing and potentially solving complex problems with public interest impacts and reducing social disparities through the responsible and ethical use of technology.
The 2026-27 fellows, who represent seven colleges across campus, will receive seed funding to support research, scholarly writing, or curriculum development on the theme of “AI and the Future of Work.”
Throughout the academic year, the fellows will meet monthly as a cohort under the guidance of Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, communication, and information, to share ideas, present work in progress, and collaborate across disciplines and with the broader PIT network. They will develop a visiting speaker series, bringing scholars to campus for public conversations about “AI and the Future of Work.”
The 2026-27 PIT Faculty Fellows and their projects are:
College of Education
Project Lead: Javier Suárez-Álvarez, associate professor of research, educational measurement, and psychometrics and associate director of the Center for Educational Assessment
Responsible AI in Test Development critically examines how generative AI can support the development of more valid, fair, and relevant educational and psychological assessments while maximizing its benefits and addressing potential risks across diverse populations.
Riccio College of Engineering
Project lead: Douglas Eddy, research assistant professor, mechanical and industrial engineering; Team member: Xian Du, associate professor, mechanical and industrial engineering
A societal problem is posed by the most knowledgeable people in manufacturing industries retiring and leaving the workforce. To address this problem, the team plans to invite other experts to campus as guest speakers for Engineering Research Center planning workshops aimed at advancing intelligent manufacturing with semantic models that inform human personal via AI and XAI to enable their decision-making in real time.
Project lead: Taqi Raza, assistant professor, electrical and computer engineering
Raza’s work investigates the hidden infrastructure behind digital payments, revealing security vulnerabilities that allow fraudulent transactions even when consumers believe their cards are protected. This project will use AI to transform today’s reactive fraud detection into proactive system hardening, analyzing everyday payment flows to design intelligent financial safeguards and evidence-based policy guidance.
College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Project lead: Christopher White, professor, music theory and graduate program director
This project includes three research activities investigating AI’s impact on musical creativity and labor: archival research into David Cope’s pioneering work at UC Santa Cruz; observations and interviews at AI laboratories in the Boston area; and an interview with engineers and executives at Suno. Will AI replace working musicians, or will it merely expand who gets to make music?
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences
Project lead: Anna Green, assistant professor, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences; Team member: Madeline Endres, assistant professor, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences
This project seeks to explore the tension between the reported detrimental effects of AI on computer science education, and the apparent benefits of AI for expert-level industry coders. How can we train students to become the expert-level coding professionals of the future?
College of Natural Sciences
Project lead: Katelyn Hudson, lecturer, environmental conservation
This project develops and pilots the AI & Creative Design Pedagogy Lab, a studio-based course and associated research study that investigates how interactive generative AI reshapes design thinking, student learning, and scholarly inquiry in the building industry. The Lab teaches students to work with AI as a collaborative creative partner while grounding design decisions in building science, community-centered values, and transparency about algorithmic choices.
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Project Lead: Weiai (Wayne) Xu, associate professor of communication
This project will develop AgentAcademy to address a critical AI and Future of Work question: as AI tools increasingly assist researchers, how do we ensure they improve rather than compromise research integrity? The project develops the CommDAAF Framework, an open-source guardrail that requires multiple AI systems to independently analyze data and cross-check their findings. It also pivots AgentAcademy as a decentralized network where AI research assistants and human scholars learn from each other to strengthen the guardrail and continuously sharpen their own research skills through real social science work.
Isenberg School of Management
Project Lead: Marta Calás, professor of organizational studies and international management. Team member: Nicole Amos, lecturer, management
This project will develop a new Human Resources course in the management department that addresses human-technology relationships in the context of AI. It explores possibilities for different forms of relationality between humans and technology, including hybrid forms in which becoming the more-than-human is addressed and questions of ethics and values are considered. While generative AI reduces the need for human workers in some roles, it becomes essential that leaders understand the uniquely human in the sustainable success of both humans and organizations. Here identifying and focusing on uniquely human skills that AI cannot truly replicate would help humans to find their place in a future of work with more automation than ever.
This story was originally published by the UMass Amherst Office of News & Media Relations.
