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Four years ago, UC-Berkeley did something that no other university had done: It launched an on-campus investigations unit for students to scour the Internet for public evidence of genocide and other human rights abuses. Alexa Koenig, the executive director of Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and one of the masterminds behind…

Mobile technology is changing the way of life for millions of rural farmers across the West African country of Ghana. They receive texts with up-to-date crop prices, weather alerts, and advice about planting. Using electronic payment services, they now have credit histories to secure loans. With mobile technology, they can…

Rhode Island-based cartographer Jeffrey Yoo Warren understands the value of smartphone location-sharing—whether for detecting pollution from a nearby industrial site, connecting with singles, or monitoring a pandemic. But Warren sees the myriad issues around privacy the practice raises. Like many others, he’s concerned about the hundreds and even thousands of…

In early 2017, a small non-profit published a free online guide to help under-resourced organizations in the social sector make better use of their data. Sian Basker, one of the masterminds behind the guide, wasn’t sure if it would make a big impact. There was no need to worry. More…

As an advocate for New York City tenants living without heat in their apartments, Noelle Francois is especially reliant on data to help her battle unscrupulous landlords. After all, she points out, “you can’t just take a photo that shows you have no heat.” For tenant advocates like Francois, making…

To hear Rahul Bhargava tell it, too many people are afraid of data. “The first thing you feel is their trepidation,” says Bhargava, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Civic Media who speaks with organizations and workers about the power of digital information. The apprehension, he says, is…

Artificial intelligence has a problem with bias. Just ask Niki Kilbertus, a doctoral student and researcher at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. The rising star in machine learning wants to put an end to discrimination in digital services—something that won’t happen until we take a cold hard look…

Name the Internet’s biggest risk to democracy and hate speech, privacy breaches, or government-sponsored hacking might come to mind. But there’s another threat posed by the web’s 30-year rise that receives scant attention: for most of the world’s population, getting online is too expensive, and for those who can afford…

When Hannah Sassaman heard that the City of Philadelphia was looking to use AI to help judges determine whether someone accused of a crime should be released before trial, she was instantly worried. “I knew that any data used to feed an algorithm of that nature would be extraordinarily ugly…

Two years ago, when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) made electronic tax returns filed by nonprofits available for the first time in a searchable format, many celebrated what they saw as a new age of transparency in philanthropy. For Neville Vakharia, a professor and graduate arts research director at Philadelphia’s…