Doug Rice, legal studies, political science, and DACSS, and Omer Yalcin, DACSS, are recipients of the 2025-26 Faculty Fellowship from the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Initiative at UMass Amherst. As fellows, Rice and Yalcin will receive seed funding to support curriculum development on the theme of "Responsible AI."
The project, led by Rice and joined by Yalcin, "utilizes a dual-pronged approach to improve the interdisciplinary data analytics and computational social science curriculum by, first, integrating key considerations–both practical and ethical–in the use of AI tools throughout the curriculum and, second, introducing a new graduate course on responsible AI for social scientists."
Read more about the 2025-26 PIT Initiative fellowships here.