Ethics Small Grants for Graduate Students

Making the Case for “Good” in a Platform Company: The Persuasive Work of Trust and Safety Professionals Recipient: Tomás Guarna (Communication grad student), 2023-24 academic year. Tomás's research explores the organizational practices that Trust and Safety professionals in technology companies engage in to pursue their ethical goals. His research shows that the achievement of ethical goals by contemporary platforms is structurally conditioned by the incentives, designs, and limitations of platform companies. It justifies a need to ambitiously re-think how Internet platforms understand their ethical missions and the organizational structures they create for this. The grant supported travel to present his research at EASST-4S 2024 for Trust & Safety professionals.

Expanding Legal Aid Internationally Using AI Recipient: Isabella Jordan (Computer Science grad student), 2023-24 academic year. International Bridges of Justice aims to help aid international injustice by providing better legal aid to those who cannot afford it. Through this organization, Isabella is working on a project to create a chatbot where incarcerated individuals can ask specific legal aid questions and get accurate and thorough responses in the event they cannot access a sufficient lawyer. Another project is creating an AI system in which, given a patient profile (ID number, case, etc), it could generate what they are eligible to access, such as bail opportunities.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Digital Empowerment Curriculum in Promoting Ethical and Safe Use of Digital Media Recipient: Mridul Joshi (Graduate School of Education grad student), 2023-24 academic year.  Although social media platforms can generate significant consumer benefits, research shows that their use can also have negative effects on well-being and mental health and on social and political outcomes. To address these potential issues, many digital literacy programs on responsible digital media use have been developed and implemented in the past decade, but there has been no rigorous evaluation of their effectiveness. Through the use of this grant, Mridul and his colleagues address this gap by conducting a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of such a program on young adults in urban India.

Advancing Social Equity in California’s Energy Transition Recipient: Emilia Groupp (Anthropology grad student), 2023-24 academic year. The transition to cleaner forms of energy offers an unparalleled opportunity to address long-standing social inequities. At the very least, a just energy transition requires that marginalized communities benefit equitably in the process. Yet, we lack an understanding of how current transition policies in California impact households facing economic precarity. As a result, there is a risk that current policies may only benefit higher-wealth households. Emilia has developed a survey tool that solves this problem by rapidly assessing household wealth, a tool that public agencies can use in determining eligibility for programs. The grant provides funding to test the survey in San Mateo County.

AI Ethics and the Global South Recipient: Evani Radiya-Dixit (Sociology grad student), 2023-24 academic year. Many existing AI design, deployment, and research practices are not oriented toward the diversity of global cultures. Yet, considering cultural contexts and injustices is critical in these practices, especially as AI products are deployed globally. The proposed funds provided Evani the opportunity to share her research with international scholars and practitioners, interested in the ethics and societal impacts of technology. According to her research, the term “Global South” has become increasingly popular, but suffers from several limitations. Her work proposes an alternative model that builds upon South-South solidarity and offers structural changes that consider the plurality of cultures within and across countries.

Paradoxes of Achieving Diversity in Corporate Boards Recipient: Jack Lin (Graduate School of Business grad student), 2023-24 academic year. Jack's research examines how prior contact between majority group members and underrepresented groups on corporate boards can paradoxically lead to a reduced willingness to appoint women and minorities to other boards they serve on. His research suggests an ironic and troubling effect whereby past diversity progress can undermine future diversity efforts by creating an illusion of greater equality than truly exists. The findings highlight the need for corporate leaders to maintain focus on increasing diversity within their organizations even as diversity increases in the broader corporate environment. This grant supports his efforts to share these findings with scholars and business leaders worldwide.

Heritage Afterlives Recipient: Shubhangni Gupta (Anthropology grad student), 2023-24 academic year. Shubhangni studies the practices of heritage through ideas of ownership and expertise in the context of Shekhavati havelis in provincial and rural Rajasthan. Through robust ethnographic and archival fieldwork that this grant supports, she argues that studying non-institutionalized and non-monumentalized historical buildings in a non-urban landscape can be studied through the conceptual framework of ‘heritage afterlives,’ which encapsulates the multiple and conflictual ideas of use (and misuse), heritage value and engagement between local community stakeholders and external heritage experts. By understanding Shekhavati havelis and their heritage afterlives, we can uncover how different types of heritage expertise are made visible or invisible in the struggle to establish multifaceted ownership of a fast-changing material landscape.

Should We Ban Mobile Gaming? Recipient: Matt Brown (Economics grad student), 2023-24 academic year. Mobile gambling has exploded in popularity in the United States. While proponents say that legalization is beneficial since people derive entertainment value from mobile gambling, critics argue that increased access to mobile gambling has brought about an increase in harmful "problem gambling." The grant provides funding for Matt's research project, where he provides new evidence about mobile gambling and gambling problems. Using a novel paradigm that links survey data with participant betting histories, he measures the fraction of consumption that is driven by errors and explores the implications of the results for policy evaluation.