StateScoop: Why 2023 could be a year for civic-tech optimism

Founder and Executive Director Travis Moore co-authored “Why 2023 could be a year for civic-tech optimism”

This year has the potential to be a positive, transformational year for government at all levels.

You’d be forgiven for scoffing at that sentence. With a divided Congress, many are ready to call 2023 a wash and set their sights on 2024. But from our vantage point in the world of public interest technology, that would be a mistake. We’ve never been as poised to drive meaningful, lasting change in government.

It’s taking place at every level of government — federal, state and local — as a result of three key factors: Increased capacity for tech talent in government jobs, digital delivery being written directly into policy, and government systems changing right before our eyes. The potential impact is enormous and will be felt in policies large and small — remaking the social safety net, transforming how we file taxes, modernizing infrastructure and beyond.

FCW: How smaller agencies are working to close their technology talent gaps

TechCongress was mentioned in an article highlighting innovative fellowships bringing much needed tech expertise to Congress.

CFPB chief technologist Erie Meyer said she "frantically" recruits from fellowships like the TechCongress and Senior Congressional Innovation programs, which were launched in 2016 to place computer scientists, engineers and technologists on congressional teams as technology policy advisors for members of Congress. 

Alcove: Announcing Alcove

Alumn Marley Rafson launches climate tech startup Alcove, an inventory management system for carbon credits.

Every decarbonization company will be as, or more, essential to our society as banks, healthcare, and other global institutions. The climate crisis is certain, it is here, and there are already teams doing the herculean work of cooling our planet. And yet these teams, on their path to institutionalizing decarbonization, are using legacy systems and retrofitting generic, outdated software to support the rollout of their world-saving technologies.

Alcove is the software infrastructure purpose-built for the decarbonization industry, the next generation of institutional companies. Over the past few months, we quietly built our first product, an inventory management system for carbon credits, and are already serving some incredible decarbonization companies. From providers that bring clean energy to the dirtiest parts of the grid to projects ambitiously scaling direct air capture projects (DAC) on the heels of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), we have learned their workflows, pain points, and joys, inside and out. 

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Handshake Blog: Why your tech dream job might be in the US government

Alumn Jack Cable featured in an article, “Why your dream tech job might be in the US government”.

If you’re a techie on the hunt for a stable job that can weather economic recessions, has no “bubble” to burst, and makes direct use of your technical skills, a government agency may be the path you didn’t know you needed. According to the Partnership for Public Service, ​​a whopping 31% of government employees are retiring in the next two years, creating a whole lot of job openings—and government tech recruiters want you.  

Tech Policy Press: An exit interview with a Hill Staffer

Alumn Anna Lenhart speaks on the Tech Policy Press podcast about her time on the hill working on tech policy.

So there’s this program called TechCongress, and they place mid-career technology fellows onto the Hill in various offices. So I got selected. It was an incredible opportunity. And when I showed up with the fellowship, I really thought I was going to go work on automated decision systems and algorithmic impact assessments and data rights, but I quickly got introduced to Congressman Cicilline’s antitrust committee team.

As I was starting to talk to them and really think about the work they were doing, I came to realize that a lot of the anti-competitive conduct they were looking at was happening at the hands of automated decision systems, right? So Amazon placing first party products in the buy box, or setting Alexa’s default shopping commands to Amazon eCommerce, or Google’s Ad Exchange is running real-time bidding on ad space that Google owns, right? Apple places their apps first in the App Store, right? This is a type of discrimination against new entries against startups, right?

FCW: Announcing the 2023 Federal 100

Alumn Eric Mill was announced as a Federal 100 for 2023, honoring those who went above and beyond in support of federal IT over the past year.

Every year, it's a tremendous privilege to be able to sift through all these stories. The pool of nominations shows the vast range of important work being done throughout the community, and there are always far more outstanding individuals than  a list of 100 can accommodate. That was certainly the case this time around.

George Mason NSI: Geoff Cain

Alumn Geoff Cain named as fellow at George Mason NSI

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning foreign correspondent, author, technologist, and scholar of East and Central Asia. His first book, Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, from a decade of his coverage of the world’s largest technology conglomerate, was published in March 2020 by Currency at Penguin Random House. It was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, and was named a Cult of Mac best tech book of 2020.

A former correspondent at The Economist, Cain is a regular commentator in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and The Nation, a contributing editor at The Mekong Review, and a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, BBC and Bloomberg. Cain writes about the ways that technology is upending our lives, communities, governments and businesses. His work takes him to the world’s most authoritarian and far-off places, from inside North Korea to the trans-Siberian railway across Russia, from investigations into genocide in Cambodia to experiments in technological surveillance in China.

Berkman Klein Center: Marissa Gerchick

Alumni Marissa Gerchick was selected as a fellow for Harvard’s Berkman Klein Institute for Rebooting Social Media Assembly Fellowship.

Marissa Gerchick is a data scientist and researcher focused on the intersection of technology and consumer protection issues, especially related to machine learning and algorithmic decision-making systems. Marissa has worked on technology policy problems in civil society, in government, at machine learning startups, and at interdisciplinary research labs.

Web Summit: Cyberwarfare in 2022 Podcast

Alumni Geoff Cain discusses Cyberwarfare and threats in the Next Stage podcast.

Modern warfare, said Josh, extends beyond physical boundaries to the digital. Nowhere is this more obvious than the war in Ukraine where cyber-attacks have been part of Russia’s arsenal from the beginning.

When with the US army, Josh’s 2018 research found that the average iPhone was about one thousand times more secure than the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, a trillion dollar fifth generation fighter jet.

Meanwhile newer tech like Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite - which has been used by Ukraine military - is using older technology protocols that can be tracked using a shop bought kit costing only 25 dollars. In fact, there are Twitter accounts that do this publicly, added Josh.

“The next conflict could end without a shot being fired because no aircraft takes off from the tarmac,” remarked the Shift5 founder.

Josh Lospinoso, co-founder and CEO, Shift5, was in conversation with Geoffrey Cain, author and freelance writer, Wired, on the FULLSTK stage at Collision 2022.

Wall Street Journal: ‘The Titanium Economy’ Review: Making It in America

Alumni Geoff Cain authored an article for the WSJ discussing supply chain issues in America.

After many grueling nights designing and building a car in “makeshift tents,” Elon Musk emerged with a prescient lesson for Tesla. “The issue is not about coming up with a car design—it’s absolutely about the production system,” Mr. Musk said in 2019, during the unveiling of the car maker’s SUV, the Model Y. “You want to have a good product to build, but that’s basically the easy part. The factory is the hard part.”

Mr. Musk wanted to take vertical integration—or control over the supply chain—to what he’s since called “absurd” heights. His business philosophy was decisive. In February 2022, the federal government announced that supply-chain issues meant that American manufacturers had five days’ worth of chips in their inventories—an emergency shortage compared to their 40-day supplies three years earlier.

The Epoch Times: The TikTok Trojan Horse and China’s Long Arm of Artificial Intelligence

Alumni Geoff Cain, in an interview for the Epoch Times, discusses his book and privacy issues in America.

In this episode of American Thought Leaders, I sit down with Geoffrey Cain, an award-winning journalist, technologist, and author of “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.”

“Everybody was constantly being watched by an artificial intelligence system, which was called the IJOP,” says Cain, referring to a pre-crime surveillance platform that the Chinese Communist Party launched in Xinjiang to predictively police the population.

Cain recently testified before the U.S. Senate about TikTok and why he believes the social media app’s troubled emergence in America, its shadowy corporate structure, and its connection to China’s security and data laws make it a unique national security threat.

“It is a disaster waiting to happen because TikTok, though the company denies it, is fundamentally obligated to follow … the laws that were created by the Chinese Communist Party,” Cain says.

MDPI: Classification of Nuclear Reactor Operations Using Spatial Importance and Multisensor Networks

Alumni Jake Tibbets researched and authored this article with UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering.

Distributed multisensor networks record multiple data streams that can be used as inputs to machine learning models designed to classify operations relevant to proliferation at nuclear reactors. The goal of this work is to demonstrate methods to assess the importance of each node (a single multisensor) and region (a group of proximate multisensors) to machine learning model performance in a reactor monitoring scenario. This, in turn, provides insight into model behavior, a critical requirement of data-driven applications in nuclear security. Using data collected at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory via a network of Merlyn multisensors, two different models were trained to classify the reactor’s operational state: a hidden Markov model (HMM), which is simpler and more transparent, and a feed-forward neural network, which is less inherently interpretable. Traditional wrapper methods for feature importance were extended to identify nodes and regions in the multisensor network with strong positive and negative impacts on the classification problem. These spatial-importance algorithms were evaluated on the two different classifiers. The classification accuracy was then improved relative to baseline models via feature selection from 0.583 to 0.839 and from 0.811 ± 0.005 to 0.884 ± 0.004 for the HMM and feed-forward neural network, respectively. While some differences in node and region importance were observed when using different classifiers and wrapper methods, the nodes near the facility’s cooling tower were consistently identified as important—a conclusion further supported by studies on feature importance in decision trees. Node and region importance methods are model-agnostic, inform feature selection for improved model performance, and can provide insight into opaque classification models in the nuclear security domain.

PennState: Brandywine, SAP cybersecurity conference addresses workforce skills development

Alumni Celeste Chamberlain was the opening keynote speaker for Penn State Brandywine's cybersecurity conference.

The opening keynote speaker was Celeste Chamberlain, governance risk and compliance officer for SAP. She discussed the importance of diversity in cybersecurity, breaking into the field after college, policy and law issues, artificial intelligence, and the future of cybersecurity.

Breakout session topics included: enterprise risk management; trends in cybersecurity education; instructional learning tool for mobile device offensive security and ethical hacking; supply chain attacks impact organizations; QR code hacking; SAP Business Technology Platform security overview; worlds connected — re-examining the legal foundations of cybersecurity; measures to maintain data integrity for security machine learning solutions; and a floppy disk, the internet and a threat hunter.

C-Span: Senate Hearing on Social Media and National Secrurity

Alumni Geoff Cain testifies before Senate on the topics TikTok and Social Media’s impact on National Security concerns.

Chairman Peters, Ranking Member Portman, and Members of the Committee: It is an honor to be invited to testify here on social media’s impact on national security. Today, I will talk about one of the greatest technological threats facing our homeland security and democracy: TikTok, the social media app owned by the Chinese parent company ByteDance. TikTok is the fastest-growing social media app ever and is expected to hit 1.8 billion users by the end of this year. Known for its fun and digestible video snippets, the app is enormously popular among celebrities and Generation Z users. It goes to great lengths to appeal to the sensibilities of the American market by loudly proclaiming progressive, democratic, egalitarian values. It posts messages on social media supporting inclusivity, diversity, LGBTQ+ rights, and pro-life causes. All this is a distraction from the reality behind TikTok’s parent company in China, called ByteDance. As an investigative journalist in China and East Asia for thirteen years, I have been detained, harassed, and threatened for my reporting on Chinese technology companies. ByteDance and its subsidiary TikTok have sought to distract us from well-documented ties to the Chinese Communist Party.