Current and Previous Grantees

Tech & Public Policy 2023 – 2024 Grantees 

You can learn more about the 2023 – 2024 Tech & Public Policy grantees here or hear more from them by checking out the videos below.

Tech & Public Policy 2022 – 2023 Grantees 

1. 360 Tech & Social Media; Innovation, Security and Governance. Georgetown’s Center on Law and National Security assembled a high-level task force of experts from diverse sectors to tackle the misuse of social media by foreign nationals and governments, as well as the challenges to trade posed by the myriad and often conflicting regulatory approaches different countries are taking. This project will was led by Laura Donohue, professor at Georgetown Law and director of Georgetown’s Center on Law and National Security, and Anna Cave, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security.
2. Censorship Resistance as a Side Effect. Micah Sherr, Callahan Family Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown, conducted research to better understand how technology is being (mis)used to prevent global citizens from freely accessing and contributing information online, and to develop new technologies for countering Internet censorship.
3. Digital Data Institutes Cross-University Partnership. The Médialab at Sciences Po and the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School collaboratively developed a shared research agenda to analyze the ways in which social media both reflects and influences modern social and political life. The institutions also explored potential joint research opportunities on the influence of digital technologies on society. This project was led by Michael Bailey, Colonel William J. Walsh Professor of American Government in Georgetown’s Department of Government and the McCourt School.
4. The Data Co-ops Project. An interdisciplinary team of lawyers, ethicists and computer scientists researched how digital platforms use information from millions of users to manipulate their behavior and access to information. The team sought to develop a blueprint for cutting-edge technology that will enable transparency and regulation, without compromising privacy. This project was led by Kobbi Nissim, professor and the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Term Chair in Computer Science at Georgetown.
5. Motivating Correction. Building on previous research on exposure to misinformation, Georgetown Associate Professor Leticia Bode studied which users engage in public correction of others on social media, why most users do not currently correct others and how to motivate more people to provide accurate and effective corrections when confronted by misleading posts.
6. Redesigning the Governance Stack: New Institutional Approaches to Information Economy Harms. Georgetown Law Professor Paul Ohm, Julie Cohen, Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law & Technology and co-director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy, and Associate Professor Meg Leta Jones laid the groundwork for a complete rethinking of the institutions and legal tools used to govern technology and technology companies. Their research focused on the uses and misuses of technology, its effects on individuals and society, and how new technologies born in the information age have outstripped existing regulatory frameworks.
7. Scaling Secure Multiparty Computation for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning. Associate Professor Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam endeavored to design a public, open-source cryptographic tool that a variety of researchers — from medicine to the social sciences — can use to analyze data containing personally identifiable information without risk of compromising individual identity.
8. Tech Foundations for Policymakers. The Tech Foundations for Policymakers team, led by April Falcon Doss, executive director of Georgetown’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy, continued to expand its efforts to bring research evidence, interdisciplinary perspectives and new thinking to the elected and appointed officials responsible for writing laws, regulations and policies to govern every-day technology.
9. Using Big Data to Predict Migration in the Era of Misinformation. Lisa Singh, professor of computer science and research professor in the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School, led a collaborative study between social scientists and computer scientists to pioneer new uses of public, open-source data collected from social media and local news to predict likely migrant flows to specific countries with sufficient warning for humanitarian agencies to act. This team also studied how misinformation travels and why it has more influence in some locations than in others.

Slides