Generating the policy of tomorrow

As first-year students within the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program inside the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Eric Liu and Ashely Peake share an interest in investigating housing inequality issues.

Additionally they share a desire to dive head-first into their research.

“In the primary yr of your PhD, you’re taking classes and still getting adjusted, but we got here in very desperate to start doing research,” Liu says.

Liu, Peake, and lots of others found a possibility to do hands-on research on real-world problems on the MIT Policy Hackathon, an initiative organized by students in IDSS, including the Technology and Policy Program (TPP). The weekend-long, interdisciplinary event — now in its sixth yr — continues to assemble tons of of participants from across the globe to explore potential solutions to a few of society’s best challenges.

This yr’s theme, “Hack-GPT: Generating the Policy of Tomorrow,” sought to capitalize on the recognition of generative AI (just like the chatbot ChatGPT) and the ways it’s changing how we take into consideration technical and policy-based challenges, based on Dansil Green, a second-year TPP master’s student and co-chair of the event.

“We encouraged our teams to utilize and cite these tools, fascinated by the implications that generative AI tools have on their different challenge categories,” Green says.

After 2022’s hybrid event, this yr’s organizers pivoted back to a virtual-only approach, allowing them to extend the general variety of participants along with increasing the variety of teams per challenge by 20 percent.

“Virtual permits you to reach more people — we had a high variety of international participants this yr — and it helps reduce a few of the costs,” Green says. “I feel going forward we’re going to attempt to switch forwards and backwards between virtual and in-person because there are different advantages to every.”

“When the magic hits”

Liu and Peake competed within the housing challenge category, where they might gain research experience of their actual field of study. 

“While I’m doing housing research, I haven’t necessarily had a variety of opportunities to work with actual housing data before,” says Peake, who recently joined the SES doctoral program after completing an undergraduate degree in applied math last yr. “It was a extremely good experience to become involved with an actual data problem, working closer with Eric, who’s also in my lab group, along with meeting people from MIT and all over the world who’re fascinated with tackling similar questions and seeing how they give thought to things in another way.”

Joined by Adrian Butterton, a Boston-based paralegal, in addition to Hudson Yuen and Ian Chan, two software engineers from Canada, Liu and Peake formed what would find yourself being the winning team of their category: “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat.” They quickly began organizing a plan to deal with the eviction crisis in the USA.

“I feel we were form of surprised by the scope of the query,” Peake laughs. “Ultimately, I feel having such a big scope motivated us to give it some thought in a more realistic form of way — how could we provide you with an answer that was adaptable and due to this fact could possibly be replicated to tackle different sorts of problems.”

Watching the challenge on the livestream together on campus, Liu says they immediately went to work, and couldn’t consider how quickly things got here together.

“We got our challenge description within the evening, got here out to the purple common area within the IDSS constructing and literally it took perhaps an hour and we drafted up the complete project from start to complete,” Liu says. “Then our software engineer partners had a dashboard built by 1 a.m. — I feel just like the hackathon really promotes that basically fast dynamic work stream.”

“People all the time talk concerning the grind or applying for funding — but when that magic hits, it just reminds you of the a part of research that individuals don’t discuss, and it was really an excellent experience to have,” Liu adds.

A fresh perspective

“We’ve organized hackathons internally at our company and so they are great for fostering innovation and creativity,” says Letizia Bordoli, senior AI product manager at Veridos, a German-based identity solutions company that provided this yr’s challenge in Data Systems for Human Rights. “It’s an excellent opportunity to attach with talented individuals and explore recent ideas and solutions that we won’t have thought of.”

The challenge provided by Veridos was focused on finding progressive solutions to universal birth registration, something Bordoli says only benefited from the undeniable fact that the hackathon participants were from everywhere in the world.

“Many had local and firsthand knowledge about certain realities and challenges [posed by the lack of] birth registration,” Bordoli says. “It brings fresh perspectives to existing challenges, and it gave us an energy boost to attempt to bring progressive solutions that we may not have considered before.”

Recent frontiers

Alongside the housing and data systems for human rights challenges was a challenge in health, in addition to a first-time opportunity to tackle an aerospace challenge in the realm of space for environmental justice.

“Space is usually a very hard challenge category to do data-wise since a variety of data is proprietary, so this really developed over the previous few months with us having to take into consideration how we could do more with open-source data,” Green explains. “But I’m glad we went the environmental route since it opened the challenge as much as not only space enthusiasts, but additionally environment and climate people.”

One among the participants to tackle this recent challenge category was Yassine Elhallaoui, a system test engineer from Norway who makes a speciality of AI solutions and has 16 years of experience working within the oil and gas fields. Elhallaoui was a member of Team EcoEquity, which proposed a rise in policies supporting using satellite data to make sure proper evaluation and increase water resiliency for vulnerable communities.

“The hackathons I actually have participated in prior to now were more technical,” Elhallaoui says. “Starting with [MIT Science and Technology Policy Institute Director Kristen Kulinowski’s] workshop about policy writers and the solutions they got here up with, and the evaluation they’d to do … it really modified my perspective on what a hackathon can do.”

“A policy hackathon is something that could make real changes on the earth,” she adds.