Data and Emerging Technologies Concentration
DATA AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
The advent of new technologies has historically shaped global political, economic, and social systems and has been shaped by them in turn. Nations and non-state actors actively shape the geopolitics of technological innovation through negotiating adoption, regulation, and contestation over technology interdependency. Students pursuing this concentration should be able to think critically across disciplines of the emerging technology field, assessing who has access to it and what for and who benefits, and who has voice in defining “progress”. Students should also actively think about the technology on its own terms, including technical capabilities and constraints, looking beyond a product and seeing its global implications for institutions, rights, labor, security and inequality. This includes understanding biological systems as programmable platforms, the role of data in genomics and bioinformatics, and the implications of biotechnology convergence with AI and digital systems.
As these technologies rapidly evolve, it is crucial to examine how rapidly changing technologies, like artificial intelligence, pose issues of data security, governance and data justice as new technologies become embedded in critical infrastructure, state decision-making, and everyday life. This concentration emphasizes human-centered and socially responsible approaches to innovation, encouraging students to analyze technologies on their own terms while assessing how individuals, institutions, and states engage with data-driven systems across contemporary innovations such as AI, biotechnology, and financial technologies.
Faculty: Raj Veeraraghavan, Vanessa Watters Opalo, Jorge Huere, Megan Lickley
Science Path: Computer science, biology
Methods: Statistics, ethnography, research methods, policy analysis, data governance, computational literacy