The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has established a new data sharing platform to advance research on systemic racism through its Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).
"There's extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequity in essentially all sectors of American society," explains MIT Professor Fotini Christia, who directs the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), where she also co-leads the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR), as reported by MIT News. "Newer research demonstrates how computational technologies, typically trained or reliant on historical data, can further entrench racial bias."
The ICSR Data Hub currently houses police-related datasets, including 911 dispatch information and police stop data from 40 of the largest U.S. cities. Ben Lewis SM '24, a recent MIT Technology and Policy Program alumnus and current MIT Sloan doctoral student, spearheaded the platform's development using Amazon Web Services, creating interfaces accessible via web or Python.
The initiative builds on a long tradition of research into racial inequity, dating back to W.E.B. Du Bois's studies of Black communities in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century, which documented both racist attitudes and institutional racism's effects.
"This information can be used in projects designed to teach users how to use big data, how to do data analysis, and even to learn machine learning tools, all specifically to uncover racial disparities in data," Jessy Xinyi Han, a graduate student in the IDSS Social and Engineering Systems doctoral programme, told MIT News.
The ICSR includes research teams working across multiple domains, including housing, healthcare, and social media, with plans to incorporate datasets from these areas into the hub.