Select Georgetown faculty members received a total of $2.3 million in research grants to support their studies related to technology and digital governance.
The McCourt Institute, an independent organization founded by individuals from Georgetown University and Sciences Po, was established in 2021 and focuses on supporting digital governance and ethical technology. The McCourt Institute’s steering committee selected nine grantees across the Georgeotwn schools for research related to ethics, policy and governance in the digital sphere.
The grants aim to identify solutions to problems associated with modern technologies, according to Michael Bailey, director of the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown and recipient of a grant for his project about the role that social media plays in political and social life.
“Each of the actual grants is doing a different thing, but each grant is trying to use new ways to think about the problems and the solutions and then embed them in a broader enterprise that has a distinctive and quite interesting feel,” Bailey told The Hoya.
The McCourt School of Public Policy will use a $25 million grant from Frank H. McCourt Jr. (CAS ’75) to continue to hold the annual competition for graduates to complete research regarding the digital era.
The grant demonstrates the McCourt School’s commitment to supporting research for ethical technology, according to Maria Cancian, dean of the McCourt School.
“With the McCourt Institute, we are looking forward to bringing together social scientists, lawyers, computer scientists, and ethicists working together across disciplines, and across institutions, toward the shared goal of shaping technology and digital governance in more ethical, equitable, and inclusive ways,” Cancian wrote in an email to The Hoya.
Laura Donohue, a grant recipient, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and director of Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law, said that the grant will fund her project, “360 Tech & Social Media; Innovation, Security and Governance,” aimed at exploring the ways in which social media is used by foreign nationals and governments.
“Deep learning, cryptocurrencies, decentralized networks, and the meta verse offer tremendous opportunities but also present profound risks to society,” Donohue wrote in an email to The Hoya. “Our goal is to anticipate and to mitigate ways in which democratic governance and societal cohesion can be undermined.”
Micah Sherr, professor of computer science at Georgetown, received a grant for his research about producing open methods of communication.
“The grant provides funds to transition our idea into hopefully something real,” Sherr wrote. “We’re working on technologies that enable users to more freely access the Internet. This is unfortunately becoming critically important, especially in countries such as Russia, where Internet access is becoming increasingly restricted.”
The grant will also support the Data Co-ops Project, which is led by Kobbi Nissim, chair of the computer science department at Georgetown, and brings together experts from different fields to research how digital platforms analyze user data to manipulate their behavior and access to information.
“Progress in this research would provide transparency into the ways our collective data is being used to shape the content and opportunities that we are offered; to enable computing over individual members’ personal information while preserving values such as privacy, fairness, and security; and to enable negotiating, overseeing, and enforcing the terms of third parties’ use of the data,” Nissim wrote in an email to The Hoya.
According to Donohue, the grant provides global research opportunities, which is crucial given the wide reach of the internet.
“The McCourt grant is a key part of our ability to ensure that our approach is well-informed by the international dimensions of the social media ecosystem,” Donohue wrote.
