The Georgia Institute of Technology has selected Michael L. Best as the new executive director of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) effective August 1, 2023. Best is a professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He was founding director of the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society (UNU-CS) in the Macau special administrative region in the People’s Republic of China. He has also served as a fellow and faculty associate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

He holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab. He received his computer science and engineering bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Both Chaouki Abdallah, executive vice president for research, and I see a bright future for IPaT with professor Michael Best coming onboard as executive director of IPaT,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president for interdisciplinary research at Georgia Tech. “Mike is our first Interdisciplinary Research Institute executive director with a primary faculty appointment in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. He brings his deep experience integrating technology and social sciences to this new role. With the rapid deployment of AI in daily life, IPaT – now combined with the GVU Center – plays a critical role in addressing not only how people interface with new technologies, but also how people should control and direct technology to meet the needs of diverse communities.”

“I’m especially appreciative of the search committee members and of professor Pinar Keskinocak for chairing the search. Together they brought forward an excellent slate of candidates. The IPaT community came out in force to meet with our four finalists and provided valuable feedback. In serving as interim executive director since January 2022, Leigh McCook has provided strong leadership and supported the merged IPaT and GVU community. Leigh will serve in this role until August 1, after which she will return to her earlier roles in IPaT and GTRI.”

Best serves as associate editor for global computing with Communications of the ACM and co-founder and editor-in-chief emeritus of the journal Information Technologies and International Development. Best has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in books, journals, and conferences since joining Georgia Tech in 2003. He has delivered more than 100 invited and keynote lectures across the USA and internationally.

While research faculty at MIT, he served as a research fellow in the Center for International Development at Harvard University, conducting policy, strategy, and technical research in information and communication technologies for social and economic development.

In 2015, Best took a leave of absence from Georgia Tech to become founding director of the UNU Institute on Computing and Society. UNU-CS was the “people and technology” research arm of the United Nations, and Best was responsible for strategic development, government relations, research visioning, budget, and administrative supervision. As director, he recruited, hired, and supervised over 40 staff and researchers and managed an annual budget of $4 million.

“I am thrilled to take on this leadership role with IPaT,” said Best. “The intersection of people and technology – where science and engineering connect with societies and communities – defines today’s greatest challenges and opportunities. AI technologies or mRNA vaccines are as much about people, society, and policy as they are about neural networks or vaccine systems. IPaT’s ongoing purpose is to strengthen Georgia Tech’s leading research at this intersection.”

The Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) brings together researchers across Georgia Tech to support world-class research, engage students, and collaborate with industry, government, and nonprofit partners. IPaT’s goal is to maximize Georgia Tech’s societal impact through people-centered innovation. IPaT was created in 2011 to embrace opportunities and needs to create a networked research ecosystem of Georgia Tech faculty and industry partners, and to amplify their combined thought leadership and on-the-ground results to create a positive economic and societal impact in critical areas that define much of everyday life.

Michael Best will be the second executive director of IPaT, succeeding the founding director Elizabeth Mynatt.

Seven students were hired for the 2023 summer research internship program created by the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) in 2021. The program is run in partnership with Serve-Learn-Sustain. The summer program is an opportunity for students looking to gain real-world experience related to research and community engagement. For 2023, the internship program duration is 12 weeks (May 15th to August 4th). All Georgia Tech students were invited to apply. This year’s summer interns will receive up to $6,000 for a full-time internship with stipends paid bi-weekly.

The seven selected Georgia Tech students for IPaT’s 2023 summer research internship program are:

Ritu Atreyas, junior majoring in computer science
Corinne Cutts, sophomore majoring in psychology
William Dyches, junior majoring in electrical engineering
Alexa Hanna, senior majoring in computer science
Geehoon Jung, junior majoring in computer engineering
Amrita Manickandan, junior majoring in computer science
Suchir Sur, junior majoring in mechanical engineering
Summer research projects available included:

* Aware Home: seeking students interested in evaluating, deploying, and integrating home sensing and automation tools and services to support research and demonstrations.

* Aware Home SmartBathroom Fixture Automation: seeking students interested deploying and configuring a home robotic research platform in the home to support research, academic, and demonstration capabilities. Read more about this project here.

* Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub: seeking students who are interested in working with diverse project teams addressing flooding on the Georgia coast. We are looking for application software developers, IoT sensor experience (e.g.Arduino), data analytics, community outreach and engagement, K-12 summer camp leads, etc.

* Esports User Research: seeking students for work in one of four projects relating to 1) novel fan experiences in mixed reality, 2) teamwork interventions to improve esport athlete performance, 3) health and safety support for esports athletes, and 4) scholastic gaming to support STEAM engagement in at-risk K-12 students."

* Augmented/Virtual Reality and Wearable Computing: seeking students interested in performing research and development in the areas of augmented/virtual reality and wearable computing. We are creating innovative systems to help diverse populations in the areas of work, healthcare, education, and entertainment.

* CellWatch is a mobile app that allows you to record, view, and analyze cellular connectivity. This app is part of a research project focused on measuring and characterizing the availability and quality of mobile broadband in rural areas. Through this project we hope to collaborate with rural and tribal communities in the US in order to inform policy and technological changes in the pursuit of digital inclusion. Building a mobile app (Android) that can record, view and analyze cellular connectivity. We are initially building a mobile app (Android) that can record, view and analyze cellular connectivity. It's a cellular speed test app. Students would help with Android, Kotlin software development for building this app. Students will also help to develop a web dashboard app; Javascript, React experience is needed and familiarity with integrating Google Maps in apps would help as well.

* Other projects may be available
 

This summer, five students in Georgia  participated in the Institute for People and Technology’s (IPaT) inaugural summer research program at Georgia Tech specifically designed for high school students. Students participating in the summer 2023 inaugural class included:

Ryan Elchahal from Westminster High School
Nekele Hayes from Campbell High
Morgan Hildebrand from Harrison High School
Harrison Lueder from Maynard Jackson High School
Lilith (Ace) Magerko from Dekalb School of the Arts
Nekele Hayes is a high school junior and while the other students are seniors in high school.
Nathan Williams, a Dekalb County school teacher, was onsite helping to support the program.

The goal of IPaT’s high school summer internship program is to expose high school students interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to ongoing research at the Institute for People and Technology. Project areas will include Esports, augmented reality/cognitive aid design, and technologies for aging in place (Aware Home).

The team of IPaT faculty and staff members supporting the program includes:

Maribeth Coleman – Director of Research (IPaT)/Principal Research Scientist
Scott Robertson – Senior Research Scientist
Brian Jones – Principal Research Engineer/Director of the Aware Home
Laura Levy – Senior Research Scientist
Clint Zeagler, Senior Research Scientist
Tim Trent, Research Technologist II
Noah Posner, Research Scientist II
Kala Jordan, Research Technician II
Cynthia Moore, Assistant Director-Business Operations
Marcia Chandler, Administrative Operations Coordinator
Christine Robinson, Senior Administrative Professional
Leigh McCook, interim Executive Director, IPaT

At the end of the internships, students presented their projects in the large Georgia Tech Research Institute auditorium on July 21. Morgan Hildebrand, Harrison Lueder, and Ace Magerko presented their Fidget Focus project. The aim of their project was to boost productivity in virtual meetings using a browser-specific Chrome extension for distraction free collaboration. Nekele Hayes and Ryan Elchahal presented their Vidsight project. An iOS app for life skills training and appliance education using machine learning and computer vision.

Painting may seem old school, but it’s a profoundly technological practice. From the tech behind brushes to the mathematics of perspective, artists of all kinds have long placed themselves where science, technology, and art meet. But it’s never been more challenging to pinpoint where a relentless ocean of technology splashes over the ever-shifting sands of artistic expression amid the rise in artificial intelligence tools such as DALL-E and ChatGPT capable of generating images, text, and even music from relatively simple text prompts. This landscape has proven fertile ground for School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) resident painter Mark Leibert, who for years has turned to algorithms and computational methods to help inspire and refine his work. Leibert and collaborators from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have gone even further, recruiting a team of student researchers in the Art & AI Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) to explore the artistic implications of AI and the technological implications of art. In fact, they were well ahead of the recent public buzz over artificial intelligence tools, having launched four years ago — before DALL-E and ChatGPT became household names.

Read more about art and AI in Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication >>

The Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech (IPaT), the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems co-sponsored $54,000 in seed grant awards to four research projects. The goal of the grants for 2024-25 is to promote research activities involving faculty and students from the many disciplines represented in IPaT. Engagement grants are also designed to foster new collaborations internal or external to Georgia Tech.

“Congratulations to this year’s four winning research teams,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “These projects explore sustainability, AI, education, artistic learning, and critical computing. They all advance IPaT’s goal to develop technologies that empower people from all walks of life.”

Congratulations to these winning project teams:

Proposal Title: Making Sustainability Data Public on the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge
Team Members: Yanni Loukissas, associate professor, School of Literature, Media and Communication; Emily Weigel, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences; Alison Valk, Jason Wright, and Charlie Bennett with the Georgia Tech Library; Steve Place, Jermaine Clonts, and Svetlana Sorok with the Georgia Tech Office of Sustainability.
Research Overview: Our research idea is to study the social effects of fostering creative, public experiences with real-time, sustainability-related data on campus with the long-term goal of learning what a resource-conscious campus community might look like. Our approach will be to develop an interactive data visualization prototype for the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge that will visualize real-time water use data in 47 student housing buildings. This visualization will serve as an adaptable research instrument through which to explore the potential for public experiences with data. It will challenge student residents to reflect on and take practical steps to change the environmental footprint of the places where they live. This research project is co-funded with Georgia Tech's Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Proposal title: Computational Design AI System to Empower Maker Educators
Team members: HyunJoo Oh, assistant professor, School of Industrial Design and School of Interactive Computing; Sehoon Ha, assistant professor, School of Interactive Computing; Sabrina Grossman, program director, Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Georgia Tech. 
Research overview: The rise of design and fabrication tools like 3D printers and microcontrollers has expanded maker education from K-12 to higher education. However, access remains a challenge, especially for underprivileged youth. Teachers often struggle to lead maker-centered activities due to a lack of design and engineering expertise, which particularly affects students in low-resource districts where school activities may be their only exposure to creative learning. To address this, we propose developing a web-based AI system that empowers teachers to lead kinetic design and engineering projects. Through participatory design with experienced teachers, the system will assist with project design and offer customized instructional guidance by identifying challenging steps and potential recovery solutions and adapting content to meet teachers’ needs.

Proposal title: Democratizing Creative Agency Through Interactive Technologies and Music Education
Team members: Moeiini Reilly, research technologist, GTRI, and human-centered computing Ph.D. student with the School of Interactive Computing; Paul Brancato, research engineer, GTRI; Nicole Brancato, composer and music educator.
Research overview: Artistic computing learning environments play a crucial role in promoting equity and inclusion in computing by offering diverse opportunities to learn computational thinking through culturally relevant programming. Despite advances in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education, there remains a significant gap in understanding how learners interact with and design creatively in these constructionist settings, as well as how the materiality of computational artifacts influences learning processes, meaning-making, and creative agency. This research seeks to build a framework for centering social and cultural dimensions of artistic learning within computational environments augmented by low-cost, technology-enhanced music education.

Proposal Title: Fostering the Landscape of “Critical Computing” at Georgia Tech
Team Members: Richmond Wong, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Heidi Biggs, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Carl DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing; Betsy DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing.
Research Overview: Critical computing interrogates the social values, normative orientations, and unintended consequences of computing applications, and it is quickly coming to occupy a central place in research and practice among Georgia Tech researchers and their larger research communities. We seek to build a transdisciplinary critical computing research community at Georgia Tech spanning computing, the social sciences, humanities, and related disciplines. Through a working group and symposium series, we will explore the methods, concepts, theories, history, funding, and evaluation of critical computing research. We will investigate approaches to critical computing research that foreground issues of social values and ethics, engage in just and equitable research approaches, explore new forms of communication and expression, and seek to pursue meaningful alternatives to the status quo.