Personal Mention

Laurie Z. Eisenberg was featured in a 60 Minutes segment Sunday about last year’s shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue and how Pittsburgh citizens of all faiths helped in the recovery. Eisenberg was interviewed by Lesley Stahl and spoke about the notes of support and items that were left at the synagogue following the shooting. “A lot of the items were religious reflecting the faith of the person who was leaving it, and not necessarily the faith of the victims …. Clearly, this was a Jewish event in that it’s an anti-Semitic attack in a synagogue. But other people weren’t seeing this as a Jewish event.” Eisenberg, a teaching professor in the Department of History, is an historian of the modern Middle East. Her areas of research and publication include the Arab-Israeli conflict and peace process; Israeli foreign policy; Israel-Lebanon relations; American foreign policy in the Middle East; the interplay of religion and politics in the Middle East; and the interactions of multiple Middle East countries and non-state actors. Watch the 60 Minutes segment.

Christopher Goranson, a distinguished service professor in Heinz College, and Yulia Tsvetkov, an assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute, have each received grants of $90,000 from the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN). They were two of 27 awardees in the inaugural "Network Challenge,” which supports the development of new public interest technology initiatives and institutions in academia, and fosters collaboration among the network's partner institutions, which includes CMU.

Goranson’s grant will help develop an open-access, open-source starter kit and fellowship program that formalizes the course framework for his Policy Innovation Lab course, a new initiative that connects students with actual policy challenges and introduces an agile, design-driven framework to rapidly create solutions to those challenges. This fall students are investigating smart city policy challenges and building policy-driven prototypes shaped by user research. The starter kit will help PIT-UN member universities train future public interest technologists by adopting coursework that encourages rapid experimentation, novel approaches and viable solutions that meet the needs of end users. Find out more.

Tsvetkov’s grant will support a project that aims to bridge the ethical gap in computer science education by enhancing competency across institutions to teach socially responsible language technologies. Tsvetkov, along with LTI Professor Alan Black, teaches a course in computational ethics, which introduces students to real-world language technology applications while addressing ethical implications and risks posed by language technology and other artificial intelligence tools. The award will help to expand the course for graduate and undergraduate students and to develop open-access educational materials including video lectures and slides, lecture notes, assignments, creation of a textbook and sample course projects. Find out more.