Class Description: Ever wanted to create a Web application that helps distribute food to where it's needed in India, or a browser extension that identifies misinformation on news websites? In the first part of this course, you'll learn about ways companies, non-governmental organizations, and governments have used technology to solve real-world social problems. In the second part, you'll work with a group to design and present a technology project that addresses a social issue. Sources: All information is from Wikipedia unless otherwise noted. Copyright: Except where otherwise noted, this presentation is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The linear classifier diagram on slide 9 is copyrighted by Kelly Yu and may not be used separately without her written permission. © 2017 Aidan Fitzgerald, Splash! at Cornell

1. Designing
Technology for Social
Impact
Aidan Fitzgerald
Computer Science, Cornell University

2. Cornell Engineering Class of 2020
Born and raised in NYC
Major in Computer Science, minor in
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Organized Social Hacks, a hackathon where
hackers wrote software to solve social
problems
Did not sleep through my own class today!
About Me

3. 11:00 - Lecture (40 mins)
11:40 - Break (5 mins)
11:45 - Activity (25 mins)
12:10 - Presentations (40 mins)
Agenda

4. By 1pm today, you’ll be able to...
Understand how technology and innovation shape society, heal social problems,
and create new problems
Incorporate considerations of sustainability, civil liberties, and social justice into
the design of a technological product
Learning Objectives

5. Big Idea #1:
Engineers design technological
products to achieve outcomes that
their users value.

6. Save lives, cure and prevent illnesses
Vaccines
Bicycle helmets
Enable communication from anywhere, at low cost
Mobile phones
The Internet
Protect sensitive data from being seen by the wrong people
Cryptography
Technological Outcomes

7. Innovation
Engineers innovate when they develop new, better methods of achieving technological
outcomes
production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in economic
and social spheres
renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets
development of new methods of production
establishment of new management systems
both a process and an outcome
Definition from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

8. Big Idea #2:
Innovation has positive and
negative impacts on society, as
well as risks.

9. Artificial Intelligence
Image credits (left to right): Kelly Yu, Clarifai Inc., Steve Jurvetson (CC-BY).

10. Machine learning technology has existed since the 1960s
1957 - Frank Rosenblatt, postdoc at Cornell, codes the first perceptron (two-layer neural network)
But only recently did we start having datasets large enough to train machine
learning models on
2009 - BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos wins Netflix Prize
2011 - Watson (IBM) defeats Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy!
More recently, the wide availability of cheap GPUs has made deep learning
feasible
2012 - Neural network at Google recognizes cats in YouTube videos
A Brief History of ML

11. What are the social benefits, costs,
and risks of AI?

12. Question:
How do we design technologies to
achieve social objectives such as
justice, equality, and privacy?

13. One Approach
First, identify the social benefits, social costs, and risks of the technology.
Then, mitigate as many social costs and risks as possible.
Finally, extend the social benefits of the technology.

14. Nonprofit organization that investigates international organized crime
Technology stack: ArcGIS, Python, Palantir
Source: C4ADS
Case Study: C4ADS

15. North Korean government’s black market activities:
Weapons
Human trafficking (including abducted foreigners)
Illegal drugs
Counterfeit, otherwise legal drugs
Counterfeit money
Counterfeit cigarettes
Profits from organized crime operations fund North Korea’s nuclear and
conventional weapons programs
C4ADS Takes on North Korea

16. Used open data and Palantir software to investigate North Korea’s illegal trade
and financial networks
What the software did:
Created a network model of 147 ships, 267 individuals, and 248 companies by parsing and
tagging unstructured data
Identified key players with lots of connections to other actors
Uncovered $800 million in trade with sanctioned companies
Resulted in criminal charges and civil asset forfeitures against a Chinese trading
company and four Chinese nationals
Sources: Palantir, Department of Justice
C4ADS Takes on North Korea

17. Break!
(5 minutes)

18. Objective: Design a technological product to solve a social problem!
Groupwork - 25 min
Presentations - 2 min each, 2 min questions
Ask me about technology, social issues, and product development!
Activity

19. Except where otherwise noted, this presentation is available under the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
© 2017 Aidan Fitzgerald, Splash! at Cornell