Researchers from Riccio College of Engineering Receive PIT Fellowships

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Top row (l-r): Anna Green, Madeline Endres, Katelyn Hudson, Javier Suárez-Álvarez; Middle row: (l-r): Xian Du, Douglas Eddy, Taqi Raza, Christopher White; Bottom row (l-r): Marta Calás, Nicole Amos, Wayne Xu, Ethan Zuckerman

The Public Interest Technology Initiative (PIT) at UMass Amherst has selected a trio of faculty members from the Riccio College of Engineering (CoE) as three of the 11 PIT Faculty Fellows for 2026-27. The mission of the PIT fellowship program is to build a public-interest-focused, interdisciplinary community to explore PIT questions and integrative solutions. The PIT fellows from the CoE are Research Assistant Professor Douglas Eddy of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, MIE Associate Professor Xian Du, and Assistant Professor Taqi Raza from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. See https://www.umass.edu/news/article/public-interest-technology-umass-announces-2026-27-pit-faculty-fellows.

According to the PIT press release, “Faculty projects are aimed at addressing and potentially solving complex problems with public-interest impacts and reducing social disparities through the responsible and ethical use of technology. The 2026-27 fellows, who represent seven colleges across campus, will receive seed funding to support research, scholarly writing, or curriculum development on the theme of ‘AI and the Future of Work.’”

Throughout the academic year, the fellows will also meet monthly as a cohort under the guidance of Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, communication, and information, to share ideas, present work in progress, and collaborate across disciplines and with the broader PIT network. 

Eddy (project lead) and Du are collaborating on a PIT project that will address a vital societal problem posed by the most experienced and well-informed people retiring from manufacturing industries. Eddy and Du will conduct artificial-intelligence (AI) research on this issue while aspiring to launch an NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) focused on such research. 

As Eddy and Du explain in their PIT application, “The most knowledgeable people in manufacturing industries are retiring and leaving the workforce, taking the knowledge from their experience with them. The good news is that responsible AI can be trained, tailored, and utilized to preserve [this kind of] knowledge and accelerate the employability of new workers. Specifically, this project aims to advance intelligent manufacturing with semantic models that inform human personnel via AI and explainable AI and enable their decision-making in real time.”

To go forward with this project, Eddy and Du seek to propose an ERC, which will focus on supporting transfer-learning/AI-enabled capabilities for manufacturing processes. Among other activities, Eddy and Du will invite AI experts from these fields to campus as guest speakers during planning workshops focused on exploring an ERC or other similar opportunities. As they say, “At this early stage, forming the ideal team of experts on this topic is most critical.”

Meanwhile, Raza’s PIT project will “investigate the hidden infrastructure behind digital payments, revealing security vulnerabilities that allow fraudulent transactions even when consumers believe their cards are protected,” as he explains. 

Raza says that “My research sits at the intersection of financial technology, security, and public trust, with a growing focus on how artificial intelligence is reshaping the systems that move money around the world. Every day, billions of people rely on digital-payment systems, mobile wallets, point-of-sale terminals, ACH pipelines, and wire-transfer networks. My work uncovers how small, often invisible failures can have enormous impacts on ordinary people: unauthorized charges, wrongful account freezes, discriminatory denials, and leaked financial behavior.” 

Raza observes that “The root cause of such failures is that AI systems in finance are often deployed without accounting for the realities of the real world: mobility, network failures, adversarial inputs, population drift, mismatched assumptions between components, and unequal impacts on different communities. My research shows how these factors break financial tech systems in surprising ways, and more importantly, how we can redesign them to be safer, fairer, and more accountable.”

PIT@UMass describes itself as “a pioneering, interdisciplinary, cross-campus program established to train our students, faculty, and communities to promote the common good and public interest through the responsible creation, management, and use of technology.” (September 2026)