Civic Tech Field Guide
Sharing knowledge and productively growing the fieldMore > Special coverage > Emerging Tech report (2020) > 2020 Emerging Tech Projects - (46)
These fifty-three specific projects, initiatives, and programs leveraging emerging technologies for the public interest were identified in the process of creating the Pathways Through the Portal report. These organizations were either discovered during our original research or were directly suggested by one or more of the 24 field leaders we interviewed for the report.
Showing 46 Results
FireSat
United States of America (the)A new global satellite constellation designed specifically to detect and track wildfires the size of a classroom within 20 minutes.
LandOS facilitates project design, due diligence, finance and certification – all key to unlocking supply at scale.
AI4Cities
EuropeSix European cities are looking for #AI solutions to accelerate carbon neutrality using pre-commercial procurement.
AI in the Trap, a collaborative art project that explores the future of artificial intelligence and predictive policing through a hip-hop lens.
NeMO-Net
NASA, East Nasa Parkway, Houston, TX, USANeMO-Net is a single player iPad game where players help NASA classify coral reefs by painting 3D and 2D images of coral.
Beta Blocks
Boston, MAExploring new approaches for community-led innovation in public spaces.
Microsoft AI for Good Challenge
AustraliaIn the 2020 Microsoft AI for Good Challenge, Australian students in Grades 7-12 are supported by their teachers to learn the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.
MIT Open Documentary Lab Docubase
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)Drawing on MIT’s legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling.
Deep learning is transforming the world. We are making deep learning easier to use and getting more people from all backgrounds involved through our: free courses for coders, software library, cutting-edge research, and community
Question Bridge is an innovative transmedia project that facilitates a dialogue between Black men from diverse and contending backgrounds and creates a platform for them to represent and redefine Black male identity in America.
Ask Izzy
33 Elizabeth Street, Richmond VIC, AustraliaAsk Izzy helps people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless to find the services they need, right now and nearby.
People with access to lasercutters and 3D printers are designing and fabricating face masks for front-line healthcare workers
Investigate how weather and climate change are impacting our communities and environment.
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Data for Good group
CanadaWe are a collective of passionate socially minded people who are empowering social change makers to be better by allowing their data to speak to them.
The Soft Robotics Toolkit grew out of research conducted at Harvard University and Trinity College Dublin which focused on developing better instructional kits for hands-on design courses (Dónal P. Holland et al. 2014).
A quest for friendship with a humanoid robot turned into a rabbit-hole of questions and an examination of the codification of social, cultural and future histories at the intersection of technology, race, gender and social equity.
Operation Serenata de Amor
Brazil (Brasil)An open project that uses data science - the same technologies used by giants like Google, Facebook and Netflix - for the purpose of monitoring public spending and sharing information in a way accessible to everyone.
Tzina: symphony of longing
Israel (Jisra'el)This interactive WebVR experience creates a space out of time to explore memory from an intimate and poetic perspective.
Data Lanterns
MIT Media Labilluminating local water quality through data performances for collective action
Hate speech: measures and counter-measures
96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UKMeasuring, analysing and countering online hate speech with advanced computational methods
The Partnership on AI was established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.
Citizen participation and machine learning for a better democracy
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)The experiment will test whether machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) can effectively cluster similar proposals and recommendations from ‘like minded citizens’ on the Consul digital democracy platform
Audit of the Administration of the Internet of Things
MassachusettsIn this audit, we obtained an understanding of the Commonwealth’s current IoT environment in terms of device use and planned use by surveying a sample of Commonwealth agencies (see Appendix) where we believed IoT devices were used for significant purposes.
Here we describe how machine learning can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate.
Stanford AI Lab (SAIL)
Stanford University, Serra Mall, Stanford, CA, USAThe Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) has been a center of excellence for Artificial Intelligence research, teaching, theory, and practice since its founding in 1962.
International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)
Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 3rd Street South, St. Petersburg, FL, USAThe International Fact-Checking Network is a unit of the Poynter Institute dedicated to bringing together fact-checkers worldwide.
Highrise
CanadaAn Emmy-winning, multi-year, many-media, collaborative documentary experiment at the National Film Board of Canada, that explores vertical living around the world.
Climate Change AI aims to facilitate work at the nexus of climate change and machine learning.
SAFELAB
1255 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027, USAThe SAFElab is a research initiative focused on examining the ways in which youth of color navigate violence on and offline.
Turing Institute AI for science and government (ASG)
The Alan Turing Institute, Euston Road, London, UKA major integrated research programme with a goal to deploy AI and data science in priority areas to support the UK economy.
The mailing list hosted by Action Network, an open platform that empowers individuals and groups to organize for progressive causes.
Harnessing Data Science to Measure and Counter Hate Speech & Crime
The Trevor Project received a grant from Google AI Impact to do machine learning on incoming calls to route callers to FAQs or humans.
The portable unit interviews users about the apps, services and digital providers they interact with, reveals what these providers know about their users, then tells the user stories about what the effects of this may be and provides recommendations regarding their level of trustworthiness, relating to the individual themselves and to other people who may be more or less impacted by the same use or misuse of the data that accumulates around their digital life.
The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter
SONYC Sounds of New York City
Brooklyn, NYSONYC is currently seeking citizen scientists to help address NYC’s noise by annotating audio clips for our machine learning technology.
Open source monitoring for understanding energy
A VR museum tour of The Colored Girls Museum
Samurai is a Frontier Artificial Intelligence Lab Dedicated to Eliminating Online Violence
This group is being formed to evaluate, design, validate, and source the fabrication of open source emergency medical supplies around the world, given a variety of local supply conditions.
BeeMonitor
Snowdonia National Park, United KingdomOpen source project using Raspberry Pis and sensors to learn about the health of a bee colony by monitoring the temperature and humidity inside and outside the hive over multiple years.
Revolutionizing Prosthetics
11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, Maryland, USARevolutionizing Prosthetics is an ambitious multiyear program—funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—to create a neurally controlled artificial limb that will restore near-natural motor and sensory capability to upper-extremity amputee patients.
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