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Public interest technology – tech that serves the public good – is a win-win for computer science students: It teaches them essential elements of the field and offers real-life experience while improving society. And there’s more than one way to get involved.

That was the message shared by speakers in a recent panel discussion on public interest technology (PIT) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) as part of the AI for the Commonwealth and Data Science for the Common Good (DS4CG) programs.

The panelists were Anshita Gupta, a research fellow at the CICS Center for Data Science and AI (CDSAI); Gregory Mitchell, AI and data innovation fellow for Montgomery County, Pa., and 2025 NobleReach Scholar; and Brian Nutwell, principal product manager at Luminos.AI. The panel was moderated by Casey Maloney, associate director of experiential learning and program director of the Undergraduate Research Volunteer program for CICS.

Gupta, a UMass CICS master’s degree alumna, said the 2022 DS4CG program hooked her on public interest technology. “My journey into PIT began with the DS4CG program,” she said. “I got to work with MediaCloud researchers on hate speech detection, a space I had little prior exposure to. It showed me that there are many opportunities in public interest technology, and we need more ethical technologists to contribute solutions.”

Fellow panelist Mitchell agreed. “We need more public interest technologists,” he said. “This was true before the explosion of AI and is just as true now – if not even more important. Whether you’re interested in government, nonprofits, academic institutions, or the private sector, there is a strong need for technologists who can communicate across disciplines and can center humans in the design and development of technology.”

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Today’s students need to explore various career paths and technologies, panelist Nutwell said. “Individual technologies and related skills such as coding in Javascript, LLM prompt engineering and AWS database management are useful for landing a job but will inevitably become obsolete,” he explained. “For a rewarding career, it is essential to embrace newer technologies as they arrive, cultivate one’s own principles about how the technology should be used and develop durable skills like teamwork, communication, product/design thinking and time management. These are powerful regardless of technology context.”

That idea hit home for Virginia Partridge, a research fellow at CDSAI, who manages DS4CG and coordinated the event. “I appreciated the message that you should always be learning and drawing on new ideas and perspectives throughout your career, not just studying programming languages or computer science concepts,” she said.

Many tools or techniques used by data scientists, machine learning engineers and software developers are not taught in standard computer science curricula and must be learned on the job, Partridge added. “Experiential learning can give students a boost in building these skills and their own self-confidence before they start their first full-time role, which will in turn help them excel in interviews and early career positions,” she said.

In DS4CG’s 11-week program this summer, UMass Amherst CICS students worked with professional data scientists and researchers as well as nonprofits to co-design and implement solutions to the organizations’ real-world problems.

Summer 2026 project partners include HILL for Literacy, the Maryland Department of Budget and Management, the Boston Cyclists Union, BirdFluMap and BirdFlow, and the Hampden County YMCA.

Students in attendance said the panel was both informative and inspiring.

“We got to hear from a product manager, a research fellow and an AI fellow all in one place,” said Thanya Yuvaraj Sah, a computer science master’s student. “Those completely different perspectives show us students how to approach a complex problem from multiple sides. It really highlights that it takes a mix of different roles and viewpoints working together to actually build something that makes a positive impact on society.”

In addition to being a learning experience, the event was also an opportunity to apply classroom studies to the real world and engage with the UMass community, said computer science master’s student Kinjal Pandey.

“It is easy to become completely focused on classes, assignments and deadlines and not spend enough time thinking about possible careers or how our work can contribute to the public good,” Pandey said, adding that she fell into that pattern at the beginning of her graduate program. “I now realize how useful these opportunities are for learning about careers, meeting people with interesting experiences and understanding how technical work is applied outside the classroom.”

Sah also emphasized the value of the panel alongside other DS4CG events such as weekly talks and sessions on policy and the common good, she said. “It is one thing to work on technical projects day-to-day, but hearing from different speakers who are out there doing this work made me realize how much of a tangible impact our work can actually have on society,” Sah said.

Events also can inspire students to find their own purpose within the field; for example, Gupta’s takeaway for the students centered around approaching AI with a sense of responsibility. “We must focus not only on building new products,” she said, “but also on understanding the impact of AI and communicating it to the communities they serve.”