PIT Initiative Supports Trucking Research by MIE’s Shannon Roberts and Sociology Colleague Laurel Smith-Doerr

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The Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass Amherst (PIT@UMass) has chosen Assistant Professor Shannon Roberts of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and her team leader and Professor of Sociology Laurel Smith-Doerr for the 2023 cohort of PIT Fellows. The PIT initiative will be supporting the two collaborators on an interdisciplinary research project titled “Auto-mating race and gender inequalities.”

The PIT initiative seeks to develop critical thinking, tech and social literacy, and pragmatic strategies needed to promote personal and professional social responsibility through the development of curricular, research, experiential, and outreach offerings across UMass Amherst’s diverse schools and colleges.

Each PIT Fellowship provides the research team with from $5,000 to $8,000 in seed funding to support groundwork or strengthen ongoing work that will ultimately be submitted for external funding.

As Smith-Doerr says about her interdisciplinary PIT project with Roberts, “We address the understudied topic of organizational contexts in artificial intelligence (AI) design by engaging with AI developers and users, with a focus on commercial automated vehicles, via photovoice methods.”

The research will ask such critical questions as “How do AI developers imagine the race/gender of users and how do truck drivers discuss the future of trucking?”

Roberts adds that future work on this project could have implications for gender and race diversity in trucking “by investigating how trucking could remain a good job while simultaneously integrating automation.”

Roberts and Smith-Doerr will be working on their PIT research project with the eventual goal of submitting a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Roberts Research Group focuses on understanding how drivers interact with technology and infrastructure to guide the design of driver-vehicle interactions, including studying human factors in transportation safety and the positive and negative impacts of how humans adapt to automated vehicles. 

Smith-Doerr, who is the principal investigator of the NSF-funded UMass ADVANCE-Institutional Transformation program for faculty equity, investigates how science, gender, and organizations are connected and become institutionalized in contemporary knowledge-based communities. (April 2023)