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September 17, 2025

This six-week program is run through the Public Interest Technology New England (PIT-NE) Summer Institute.

For the second year since its inception, �Թ��� students in the are working on experiential learning projects that benefit communities.

This summer, 15 undergraduate recipients of the Impact Technology Fellowship—including �Թ���’s Karis Moon ’27 and Anna Du ’28—tackled projects ranging from exploring an LLM-powered web app for residents to better understand neighborhood safety to creating AI tools for auditing real estate systems to advocate for fair housing enforcement.

�Թ��� is one of seven co-founding institutions of , which was established in 2023 to bolster higher education programs and workforce development in Public Interest Technology (PIT) throughout New England. In PIT-NE’s scope, PIT encompasses projects across sectors that serve the public good and engage in core values including ethics, justice, equity, and co-design, among others.

“The Impact Technology Fellowship is open to students who attend schools in New England,” says Benjamin Linder, Design Justice Studio director and professor of Design and Mechanical Engineering, who helped create the Fellowship and other summer programming thanks to . “We’re looking for young people who are strong coders, interested in civic technology, and curious about PIT careers.”

“When I learned about the Fellowship, the public interest aspect was compelling to me,” says Du. “Being paired with a nonprofit and working on a real project they wanted to complete sounded like a good way to use my computer-related skills while also working with a client on a job that matters to people.”

The Fellowship provides students with an immersive experience giving them knowledge and skills to understand and pursue opportunities in this space. Over the program’s six-weeks, students participate in tech workshops led by  practitioners, as well as PIT foundational modules led by Linder and colleagues on collaborative design, ethical practices, reflection, and storytelling.

“At �Թ���, we have been engaging students in community-based design for many years, but it’s not necessarily common in engineering education,” says Linder. “TThrough the fellowship, students come to understand they shouldn’t do work for communities they haven’t spent time in. That's challenging, because these projects require real technical work that must be balanced with developing meaningful relationships with the people who will be impacted by what they create.”

“My group is working on a chatbot dashboard for residents of Dorchester to easily access trustworthy public safety data,” says Moon, who knew of the Impact Technology Fellowship because her roommate, Dongim Lee ’27, . “I wrote the chat page from scratch using TypeScript, connected it to the Gemini API, and used React on the front end. I also took on project management for the team and made sure we stayed on track, which was one of the bigger tasks throughout the project.”

For Moon, she was pleased to see how well her �Թ��� education prepared her for such a technology-heavy and community-facing project.

“I learned about APIs in my Software Design class at �Թ���, which I used to write a program in Python and create my own custom endpoint so it could communicate with the API,” says Moon. “The skills I learned in my Collaborative Design class also got used a lot during my fellowship, such as going out into Dorchester to interview residents in person, as well as ways to ideate and organize the team’s concepts using Post-It Notes.”

In Du’s project to create a tool that detects AI-generated images on housing websites to prevent fraud, she also put her �Թ��� skills to good use. Her team worked with the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) on a resource to help people from getting scammed by fake or falsified real estate listings.

“Using some of what I learned in my software design class, I was able to look for existing image generator models and adapt them to the NFHA’s specific needs, such as using the wide-angle lens style that’s typical on real estate sites,” says Du. “With this, we created a set of ‘bad data’—realistic, AI-generated real estate images—that can be used to train a model that automatically detects fraudulent images in the future.”

Teams presented their final projects directly to their clients, as well as in a final wrap-up on Boston University’s campus that was open to the public.

“The work we do is with real clients using collaborative design principles united with software engineering, data science, machine learning, and user experience design,”  says Linder. “We seek to provide an expansive, purposeful educational experience and make good on our responsibility to be active, positive participants in the communities we call home.”

Following the pilot year of the Impact Technology Fellowship, 84 percent of the 21 student participants indicated greater interest in pursuing a public interest-focused career when they enter the workforce. 

“Having this kind of opportunity to see the different kinds of jobs I could have as an engineer who wants to contribute to the public good was really important,” says Du. “I learned a lot not only about the work, but about how to find jobs in this field through different job search platforms, and I think that will really benefit me when the time comes to choose a career.”

.  will open in the early spring.