February 17, 2025
In today’s quickly developing technological landscape, it is important to empower students to take initiative towards a well-regulated and fair digital future. One way Pittsburgh has taken a step towards advancing this movement is through the Hacking4Humanity event, which combines policy, technology, and ethics by giving students the opportunity to play their own role in stopping online hate.
This event also provides a new avenue for University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information (SCI) to equip students with ethical knowledge, practice collaborating in teams, and networking opportunities that are essential for professional success. Pitt students are encouraged to participate in events like this to gain real-world experience while also boosting their resumes!
Student-Based Solutions
This event, founded in 2019 by PittCyber, demonstrates how we can combine computer skills with policy-based knowledge to take a collaborative approach to stopping cyber hate. In January, students competed in teams of one to four people to create policy or tech solutions that mitigate existing ethical issues online or create a new space that fosters positivity. The students worked on their projects online until Feb. 7, then came together to present their work at the Duquesne University Power Center to a panel of representatives from companies including Meta, Microsoft, and RAND. The winners get the opportunity to travel to Harrisburg where they present their work to the First Lady of Pennsylvania along with a group of PA policymakers.
“This project gives students the opportunity to engage with real-world problems outside of the work they usually do in class or in an internship,” says John Slattery, a founder of the event and the Executive Director of the Carl G. Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law at Duquesne University.
Hacking4Humanity allows students to play a part against an issue that is happening on a wider scale and give them real-world experience in the field of tech ethics, which they can continue to call back to throughout their professional lives and future projects. Not only does it give students the opportunity to bring their ideas to fruition, but it also diffuses the message of a brighter digital future throughout all of Pittsburgh.
An Accessible Approach
By being accessible to students who attend Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pitt, Duquesne University, the Community College of Allegheny County, and more, Hacking 4 Humanity creates new avenues for city-wide collaboration and a space for college students with different experiences to share their interests. It also is accessible for students from any disciplinary background, meaning that even people with no tech experience can work towards this larger goal in their own unique way.
For example, those in humanities-based backgrounds can utilize their knowledge of social, historical, cultural, or political contexts to address the underpinning ideas that exacerbate online hate. Those in tech-based backgrounds could then build upon those ideas from a technical standpoint and propose an algorithm, program, or website that brings those ideas to fruition. Allowing students to work in diverse teams makes for a collaborative space that prepares students for the work they will encounter in their professional lives post-graduation.
“PittCyber founded Hacking4Humanity in 2019 because we wanted to give Pitt students a chance to work on what feel like really intractable problems; and we wanted students to realize that no one discipline has the answers to these problems,” says Beth Schwanke, executive director of PittCyber. “We’ve found that often the groups that have the most effective projects are those that bring together students from more than one major.”
This Year’s Winners
The ideas that students propose in the Hackathon span a wide range of topics. Participants in the policy track might tackle anything from the corporate policies of major companies to local county regulations. This year, the winners of the policy track, Andre Washington and Daniel Terrero from Duquesne University, presented a proposal that would promote restorative justice on gaming platforms. Their policy aims to utilize models practiced in criminal and educational restorative justice systems to guide people who break a game’s code of conduct rather than resorting to immediate bans. Offenders are required to complete educational modules covering topics such as empathy, race, and violence before being allowed to return to the game.
Makayla Chang, a first-year at SCI, was one of the winners of the tech track, alongside Sarah Cross from CMU and Sal DeFillipo from Duquesne University. They proposed a chrome extension software called Parakeet Cloud, which tracks and summarizes the sentiment of content internet users consume throughout the day. This helps people visualize and understand how their media usage may impact their mental health.
These solutions pave the way for a future where students feel empowered to develop their own creative approaches to ethical challenges they may encounter in their careers, while also promoting the message of combating online hate to communities all across Pittsburgh.
Congratulations to Makayla Chang (SCI '28) for representing SCI in the event and securing a win! Read more information about this year’s Hacking4Humanity, and watch the recordings of the full event.