Into the World of AI for Good: Reflections on My First Week in the Civic AI Lab at Northeastern

By Undergraduate Researcher Liz Maylin

Last Tuesday, I began my journey in the Civic A.I. Lab at Northeastern University with a mix of excitement, curiosity, and gratitude for the experience. A special thanks to Professor Eni Mustafaraj (Wellesley College) and Dr. Saiph Savage (Northeastern) for this opportunity. I embarked my first week in this transformative space, eager to learn and contribute to the lab, which studies problems involving people, worker collectives, and non-profit organizations to create systems with human centered designs to address these problems. Some of the objectives of the lab include fighting against disinformation and creating tools in collaboration with gig workers. Previous projects include designing tools for latina gig workers, systems for addressing data voids on social media, and a system for quantifying the invisible labor of crowd workers. Nestled at the crossroads of Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and civic engagement, the research of this lab is thoughtful and resoundingly impactful. I am honored to join a project that will support workers in their collective bargaining efforts.

First Impressions at Northeastern

During my first days, the differences between Wellesley College and Northeastern stood out to me the most. Wellesley College is located 12 miles outside of Boston in the extremely quiet, wealthy town of Wellesley whereas Northeastern is located directly in the city, allowing for greater access and a larger community. I get to walk past Fenway Park, various restaurants, boba shops, a beautiful park, and the Museum of Fine Arts on my commute! It is definitely a change of setting but I am happy for the experience. So much to explore!
First weeks are exciting because there is so much to learn and new people to meet. The research team is full of amazing, talented students that I am excited to collaborate with and learn from. As I prepare for the application process for graduate school, I am fortunate to gain insight into the lives of PhD and Master’s students that will help me make informed decisions for my own academic journey. Everyone has been very welcoming and helpful, I am thrilled to spend this summer with them.

Exploring Gig Work and Participatory Design

I have spent most of my first week getting familiar with gig work and participatory design through literature review. Gig work is a type of employment arrangement where individuals perform short-term jobs or tasks. This work includes independent contractors, freelancers, and project based work. Often, gig work is presented as the opportunity to “be your own boss” and “ to work on your own time”, however this line of work comes with challenges such as irregular income, limited job security, and typically no benefits. The use of digital platforms has facilitated connection between workers and employers; however, there is room for improvement that will benefit both users and platforms. Participatory design is a method that includes stakeholders and end-users in the process of designing technologies with the goal of creating useful tools or improving existing ones. For example, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin held sessions with drivers from Uber and Lyft to reimagine a design of the platform that would center their well-being. It’s fascinating work that unveils different solutions and possibilities capable of reconciling stakeholder and worker issues.

Learning about Data Visualization

Additionally, I have been getting acquainted with different forms of data visualization. I have some experience programming with python but usually for problem sets or web scraping so I was filled with anticipation to acquire a new skill. Specifically, I have focused on working on text analysis. With the help of tutorials, google, and Viraj from our lab, I was able to make a wordcloud that showed the most frequent words in a dataset that included reviews of women’s clothes from 2019 (shown below).

Through this process, I was able to learn about various resources such as Kaggle and datacamp that provide datasets and tutorials to practice working with data. I originally tried using the NLTK library but I had several problems with my IDE (VSCode). With some troubleshooting help from lab members, I switched my approach to just using pandas, matplotlib, and wordcloud. I am happy I got it working and I’m looking forward to refining this skill. As I wrap my first week, I am beyond excited for the opportunities that lie ahead. This experience has ignited a passion for leveraging technology for civic engagement. I am grateful for the warm welcome, the technical help, and the inspiring conversations from this week. I am eager to collaborate and contribute to the work of the lab. :)