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This project is developed through an ongoing collaboration with the Historic Westside Cultural Arts Council. Through a series of design workshops and public events, we are co-designing mobile and social technologies to help cultivate a shared community identity to support local civic engagement. By working directly with community members, we are able to build technology platforms suited to their specific needs and which amplify their values and concerns as the community goes through significant changes.

We developed a visual analytics system, VitaLITy, to promote serendipitous discovery of academic papers wherein users may “stumble upon” relevant literature, when other search approaches may fail. VitaLITy (1) utilizes transformer language models to help users find semantically similar papers given a list of seed paper(s) or a working abstract, (2) visualizes the embedding space in an interactive 2-D scatterplot, and (3) summarizes meta information about the paper corpus (e.g., keywords, co-authors, citation counts, and publication year).

With nearly four billion people still lacking access to the internet, efforts to expand internet access are growing rapidly across the world. Cuba remains one of few emerging nations where this access is still affected by historical trade embargoes and restrictions. Since the 2014 announcement of the normalization of relations between Cuba and the U.S., however, internet access in Cuba is increasing. This work is situated during this time of transition to explore the impacts of increasing internet access on individuals and communities living in Havana.