Real Challenges, Real Solutions
User-centered research. Human-centered design.
The Policy Innovation Lab (PIL) is an intensive, applied policy course at Heinz College that prepares students to become public interest technologists who are creative, ethical, inclusive, and responsive. This task is accomplished by teaching graduate students how to design and build public interest technology services with human-centered design, and by following an agile methodology. Working directly with a client from a government office or public service nonprofit, students aim to develop and deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with high-impact results.
Select PIL students may be invited to continue their work during a fellowship the following summer.
The Public Interest Technology University Network Challenge Fund, a fiscally sponsored project of New Venture Fund, has generously supported the development of open access course materials and the PIL Playbook, as well as the creation of Public Interest Tech (PIL) Fellowships at Heinz College.
Policy Innovation Lab Course Materials
Course materials for the Policy Innovation Lab are currently available through CUNY’s Public Interest Tech OER Commons site, the Public Interest Tech platform pitcases.org operated by Georgetown, Howard and Stanford universities, and Canvas Commons. We intend for these free resources to make it easier for universities to adopt and enhance coursework in public interest technology.
The materials include 7 weekly course modules, 12 assignment instructions and rubrics, a sample syllabus, instructor notes, and other course resources. They also include sprint planning and research plan templates, agile methodology readings and videos, and prototyping tools.
These course materials were also referenced in the development of the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age syllabus.
View Policy Innovation Lab materials
Policy Innovation Lab Playbook
The PIL Playbook was designed and improved with student input, and includes a series of custom “plays” designed to help new students ramp up quickly to a Public Interest Technology mindset. The PIL Playbook has been an important resource for ongoing PIL courses at Heinz College, and has helped provide new students with a model for how to operate most effectively within the structure of the course and apply the relevant methodologies in their work.
View Policy Innovation Lab Playbook
Recent Course Highlights
The RIF Impact Framework: Language, Legibility, and Design for Government Capacity
Project: In response to the growing invisibility of workforce disruptions across the U.S. federal government, a team of Heinz College graduate students developed the RIF Impact Framework. This cybernetic tool helps public institutions document and interpret reductions in force (RIFs) through a structured data schema and reflexive, ethics-driven practice. By mapping lost job functions, program impacts, and geographic relevance alongside narrative context, the framework offers a practical yet thoughtful approach to tracking diminished government capacity.
Designed for adaptability and transparency, the framework goes beyond data collection to encourage second-order observation—prompting institutions to reflect on their roles within larger systems. Rooted in public interest technology, labor theory, and systems thinking, the RIF Impact Framework supports democratic oversight, institutional memory, and long-term planning in an era of complex governance challenges.
Project Team: Jaimie An, David Fuentes, Amy Kang, and Liv Schaefer
The students were named runners-up for the 2025 #NewMacy Cybernetics Prize, awarded by the Laboratory for Cybernetics, in recognition of their work.
Finding the Needle in the Haystack: GovScan
Project: How can we take state plans for programs that are federally funded and state run (for example: Medicaid and child care subsidies) and make them digestible, easily searchable and actually useful to understand how 50 different states are implementing programs?
Project Team: Davis Craig, Aakash Dolas, Tyler Faris, and Eashwari Samant (pictured below)
Combing through countless PDF reports for hours in search of a piece of relevant information is no one’s idea of an interesting day at work. Tedious, overwhelming, soul-crushing, maybe. Engaging? Not so much.
Dedicated public servants – and lots of other people – do it anyway, often, in service to some larger goal: to make the case for a new policy, to advocate for funding, or to explain a position. This team of students came up with a generative AI application that helps researchers find the information they seek in a matter of seconds, not hours.
Their tool, GovScan, provides government workers the ability to locate the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Labor Trafficking: How Might We Create Safer Employment Opportunities for Immigrants/Asylum-Seekers?
Project: Technical interventions to help immigrants and asylum seekers avoid human trafficking
Project Team: Abdulaziz Abdulakhadov, Apoorva Shetty, Riddhima Singh, Tasneem Sultana, Jhanvi Udani (pictured below)
Project image is from the final project created by student team.
Criminals who deal in human trafficking prey on vulnerable people. Because they may not speak the language of their new country fluently and are often fleeing violence and poverty, immigrants seeking asylum are especially susceptible to exploitation. Human traffickers can lure such unsuspecting asylum-seekers through fake job postings hosted on popular employment websites.
This student team worked with a researcher at Johns Hopkins University to develop a machine learning (ML) model that identifies signals indicating the risk of human trafficking through job descriptions.
They created a working prototype that accomplished two key tasks. First, it scraped online hiring websites to create a database of job postings. Second, the team applied a large language model (LLM) to analyze the content, flag potential scam offerings, and store details (names, entities, locations) about such listings.
This tool has the potential to help law enforcement agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are attempting to stop human trafficking. The prototype could also be used to develop a web extension that helps non-native job seekers directly by analyzing the contents of the page and then indicating whether a given job appears to be a safe and legitimate opportunity.
See the students' research project
Accelerator Model for the Policy Innovation Lab
Project: Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College is piloting an Accelerator Model for their Policy Innovation Lab. The vision is to encourage graduate level students to explore how to improve government through the launch of new products and ventures. This document provides an overview of the Accelerator and Partnering resources. It’s a free and open-source resource for the greater Public Interest Technology (PIT) University Network.
Public Interest Technology Fellowship
Some PIL students further developed PIT projects through funding provided by the New Venture Fund. The fellowships have supported these talented students during both the summer months as full-time fellows, as well as part-time academic year fellows.
Haleema Ahmad | She/Her | Linkedin: @haleemaahmad
Haleema Ahmad is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University and will be concluding her studies in May 2022. She worked on a cross-functional team looking at how the U.S. Department of Justice could compare public health data against drug-crime data to identify discrepancies in policing.
She was able to take key lessons learned about agile methods and project scoping from the class and apply them to her summer fellowship with the Innovation Institute for Tomorrow, a non-profit that aims to bring sustainable and equitable STEM education to all classrooms across Pennsylvania, with a focus on rural regions that have struggled to rebound from a long-standing economic recession. Haleema also worked on a supplemental program initiative to encourage young female participation in the STEM programs.
Yu-Jan Chang | She/Her | Linkedin: @yu-jan-chang
Yu-Jan is in the MIIPS Program (Master of Integrated Innovation for Products and Services), class of 2021.
She worked on a PIL Project titled "Combating Bias in Government Data/Algorithms" where she partnered with the U.S. Census Bureau's xD team to build a toolkit to help governmental agencies minimize bias in their datasets. The team participated in the early stage of the project, conducting a set of human-centered design research to discover underlying user needs. Yu-Jan worked as the tech specialist (UX designer) for this project, mainly focusing on creating stakeholder interview protocols, moderating synthesis sessions, and designing high-fidelity prototypes. She advises incoming fellows to enjoy the process of working with the team and partners. “It's gonna be a wonderful and unique learning experience at CMU!”
Priya Gupta | She/Her | Linkedin: @priyaharbolagupta
After beginning graduate school in Fall 2019, Priya Gupta graduated from CMU in August 2021 with an MBA and MSPPM dual degree.
She participated in the PIL Fellowship in Spring 2021, working with the U.S. Census Bureau to envision a toolkit to help federal agency workers learn about and address bias in algorithms being deployed at the federal level. Priya now works on customer support strategy at Google, helping protect customers’ privacy and security.
Advice for new PIT Fellows? “Always look for what assumptions you or your client are making. Talk with your client at the outset about the importance of identifying and questioning/validating assumptions to make sure you’re designing the right solution. Once you’re on board, test those assumptions at every step of the way (through interviews and prototyping). When you validate or disprove those assumptions, don't just present the problem. Present your client with a proposed path forward based on those insights.”
Alex Jackson | She/Her | Github: @krystalrain
Alex is an Master of Science in Information Security Policy & Management student at Heinz College, Class of 2022.
She worked during the Spring 2021 semester with the Census Bureau’s xD team on an online tool aimed at combating data bias in federal government data science work.
During summer 2021, she is working with the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. As part of their CyberAI project, she will investigate the ways artificial intelligence will impact future cyberspace safety and policy. Alex has a passion for ethics and is currently involved in research on the philosophical and pedagogical approaches to teaching ethics in computing. In her spare time, she’s an active member in effective altruism spaces concerned with transformative and misalignment risks in AI.
Joseph Kopko
Joe is a graduate of the Educational Technology and Applied Learning Sciences (METALS) program in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. Prior to study, Joe operated a technology and policy consulting practice, and previously worked in product development and operations for Zodiac Aerospace. He is interested in the intersection of technology and policy (especially with regard to education), as well as intelligent tutoring systems, game design, and computational models of learning. Joe worked with the xD innovation team at the US Census Bureau, investigating a new privacy-focused distributed data science platform technology called PyGrid and how it could streamline data collection for the Census bureau. Additionally, Joe worked with the team to evaluate the current recruitment landscape in the US federal government for technology innovation and identify opportunities for improvement in the talent pipeline.
Alisar Mustafa | She/Her
Alisar Mustafa recently graduated from Heinz College with a Master of Science in Public Policy and Management. She is passionate about the development of ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models in addition to using data analytics, technological solutions, and policy to bridge the gap between advocacy and policy change.
During her time at Heinz College, she worked as the engagement coordinator at the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Heinz College in addition to serving as the president of the Council on Diversity, Richness and Inclusion (CDRI). She was also a Public Interest Technology Fellow working directly with the Census Bureau xD Technology Team on developing a tool that aims to educate and equip government agencies to recognize and minimize bias in their respective government datasets and algorithm implementations.
Campbell North
Campbell North is currently pursuing a Master’s of Science in Public Policy and Management - Washington D.C. Track at Carnegie Mellon University and will graduate in Spring 2022. She began the PIT Fellowship in the summer of 2021 working on her project supporting The Initiative: Advancing the Blue & Black Partnership’s (TIBBP) with a Consent Decree Repository + Consent Analysis. This supports the organization's mission to improve public safety and heal the relationship between police and the communities they serve by building a data repository and conducting a content analysis of police consent decrees. TIBBP developed a publicly available dashboard tracking the public safety metrics of cities with police departments under consent decree. This project analyzes the text of consent decrees at the granular level to identify patterns in provisions and public safety metrics. This supports TIBBP, policymakers, and the public by attempting to pinpoint the themes of effective consent decree reforms. The data repository and analysis will be accompanied by a Consent Decree Playbook + Citizen’s Guide.
Chizobam Nwagwu | Github @cnwagwu
Chizobam Nwagwu was a Coding it forward Civic Digital Fellow for the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Chief Data Officer. She co-led the redesign of Healthdata.gov by applying human-centered design methods. She is passionate about people-centered policies and services. Chizo most recently completed her Masters of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a Policy Innovation Lab Fellow working on open-sourced public interest tech products with government and non-profit partners. Before grad school, she was a U.S. Student Fulbright Researcher in Nigeria. During her undergraduate career, she was recognized as a McNair Scholar and PPIA Fellow.
Sarah Sherwood | She/Her | Linkedin: @sarahsherwood19
Sarah attended Heinz College from 2019-2021 in the MSPPM-DC track. Following the Spring 2020 PIL course, she became a fellow in May 2020 and has continued since working full-time for the summers of 2020 and 2021, and part-time during the school year.
During summer 2020, she worked on a project with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, where the team worked to improve and incorporate public interest technology into their green bond reporting. Over the school year, she worked with the Anti-Defamation League to understand how their H.E.A.T. (Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, and Terrorism) map could be improved to better meet the needs of their users.
This summer, she is working with Communitopia, a Pittsburgh-based environmental education non-profit where she is leading the development and creation of a Climate Action Plan for the Woodland Hills School District. She will also be developing an open source tool for other schools to use to develop their own climate action plans.
Sharleen Devjani | LinkedIn
Sharleen Devjani graduated with a Master of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University. Sharleen brought seven years of experience from South-East Asia to her team and worked on the Impact Green initiative as the Project Manager.
Sanika Sahasrabuddhe
Sharleen Devjani graduated with a Master of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University. Sharleen brought seven years of experience from South-East Asia to her team and worked on the Impact Green initiative as the Project Manager.