Internship Program 2020

The Algorithms and Justice project, part of the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, is focused on the impact of AI, machine learning, and other algorithmic technologies on governmental decision-making, particularly within criminal justice contexts. We are seeking two graduate-level interns to help advance our policy, research, and educational efforts on the use of actuarial risk assessment tools across used on adult populations in pretrial, probation, sentencing, prison, and parole decisions. Specifically, interns will assist our team in the collection and interpretation of data related to these instruments; perform legal and/or policy analysis of developments in the field; and assist with the writing and coordination of research projects.

Qualified candidates should be able to demonstrate interest in the complex social and legal implications of AI - particularly issues pertaining to fairness, bias, transparency, and equality; excellent research, writing, and data analysis skills; experience with quantitative research, data visualization, or creating/managing databases; and passion for open source investigation and uncovering difficult to find information.

Assembly: Disinformation is seeking 1-2 enthusiastic, highly motivated interns to contribute to a variety of programming, outreach, and research related tasks. Organized around three tracks—the Assembly Forum, the Assembly Fellowship, and the Assembly Student Fellowship—Assembly brings together students, technologists, professionals, and experts from across disciplines to explore and tackle disinformation in the digital sphere from a cybersecurity perspective. Depending on skillset and interest, the intern(s) joining our team can expect to work closely with staff on a wide range of projects, such as: developing programming for the Assembly Student Fellowship’s Seminar Series, including researching potential speakers and topics; drafting website content, blog posts, and slide decks for prospective applicants; conducting outreach to program alumni; and supporting with research and content development. We are looking for candidates that are highly organized, detail-oriented, and strong writers and researchers. Background or strong interest in disinformation from a cybersecurity perspective a plus. This internship is limited to undergraduate students.

The Berkman Klein Center is committed to continually advancing our Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) efforts, and we seek an intern who has a passion to see the Internet & Society space increasingly represent researchers from marginalized and historically underrepresented communities.  The intern will work with program and administrative staff to help us to compile and assess resources to use in our efforts to ensure that the Center is designing inclusive programs and practices, will help us to strategize our implementation of new efforts, and will help us to reach and engage people from front line communities in our research.  You can read more about the Center's commitment to Diversity and Inclusion at: https://cyber.harvard.edu/about/diversityandinclusion

In the BKC Summer Social Issue Workshop a small team of interns will work on current civic research questions. The program will use research tools developed both at the Berkman Klein Center and at other institutions. Interns will have exposure to multiple research techniques, datasets and topics with a range of Center staff and community members. The BKC Center Summer Workshop is open to students from all disciplinary backgrounds and to both undergraduate and graduate students. In your application, please include any previous research experience, your interests in specific civic and cultural research agendas that BKC focused upon, and why you think you are well-suited to this internship opportunity.

The Berkman Klein communications team is looking for a creative, motivated candidate to work on a variety of editorial, administration, and digital media tasks that help tell the Berkman Klein story to the public and target audiences. The comms intern may be asked to assist with any aspect of the Center’s communications activities, including editing and writing website and social media content, designing materials, pitching in with multimedia production, assisting with events and outreach, and developing new and creative ways to share and amplify the research and other activities undertaken by the Center and its projects. The right candidate will be sharp, flexible, and reliable and will possess strong organizational skills to help juggle multiple tasks, people, and projects. An understanding of both traditional and social media is key for this position.

The rapidly growing capabilities and increasing presence of AI-based systems in our lives raise pressing questions about the impact, governance, ethics, and accountability of these technologies around the world.  Our work on the Ethics and Governance of AI seeks to help bridge the gap between principle to practice, through best practices, curriculum development, knowledge sharing, and other resources designed to help shape AI’s development in a way that advances the public good. Throughout the summer, interns will work closely with a team of faculty and staff at Berkman Klein to help develop resources to inform and support public and private sector decisionmakers. The types of work interns may assist with could include: creating educational and informational resources for decisionmakers;  writing and editing including case studies about public and private sector organizations’ uses of AI technologies; and exploring issues and challenges pertaining to global governance and inclusion, digital transformation, and media manipulation in order to translate academic findings into useful information for policy makers and additional stakeholders. Candidates for this position should be eager to work across a variety of different disciplines. For more information about our work, see this recent post and https://cyber.harvard.edu/topics/ethics-and-governance-ai.

Interns joining the Geek Team may extend open source software, build scalable websites, or aid in the tech aspects of research that keeps the Center moving. Our team works with ruby, perl, php, bash, javascript, PostgreSQL, MySQL and a slew of other tools.  We have a small group of talented, devoted, fun, full-time developers on staff that can help hone your 1337 coding skills as well as provide fun projects to pair code or geek out on and hardware and software support to help deploy your projects on Berkman infrastructure. More info about the projects that we work on can be found on our GitHub organization page at http://github.com/berkmancenter.

Summer interns working for Lumen will work on a range of assignments related to Lumen’s ongoing operations, expansion efforts, and research initiatives, including but not limited to: helping with managing and curating the database, including coding metadata and working with source partners to facilitate the ingestion and processing of notices; managing the website, working on international collaboration initiatives; event planning and management; and assisting work on research and writing projects centered on the database corpus, either internally or in collaboration with external researchers.

The Public Discourse in the U.S. 2020 Election Project is seeking a summer intern to join a team of researchers led by Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler working on studying digital media ecosystems and political discourse related to the U.S. 2020 elections. Intern tasks will include researching, coding data, analyzing data, writing analyses of news stories, and assisting with the publishing of research reports about the 2020 presidential election. Applicants should have excellent research and writing skills and a demonstrated interest in working on issues related to political communication, digital media studies, misinformation, or hate-speech. This research project builds upon prior research carried out by researchers at the Berkman Klein Center focused on the study of political discourse and draws upon the approaches and methods developed in a study of the 2016 election, which resulted in a 2017 report, “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election” and a 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics.” The primary engine for analysis is the Media Cloud project, which was created to track and understand online media ecosystems.

The Privacy Tools Project brings together expertise in computer science, statistics, law, policy, and social science across five research centers across Harvard and MIT. It seeks to develop methods, tools, and policies to further the tremendous research potential of data containing information about individuals while protecting privacy. The legal team, led by Prof. Urs Gasser at the Berkman Klein Center, explores cross-disciplinary approaches to data privacy and devises new privacy frameworks, legal instruments, and policy recommendations that complement privacy-preserving technologies being developed in the project. To support this work, the Berkman Klein team is looking for rising second and third-year law students to conduct research and analysis on topics related to privacy law and policy. Summer interns will write legal memoranda on selected topics in privacy law and policy, draft data sharing agreements, survey the academic literature on privacy, contribute to the development of new tools for privacy and data sharing, and attend lectures and events with privacy experts from a wide range of disciplines. More information about the project can be found on the Privacy Tools project website at http://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu.

We are seeking to hire a small team of summer interns to work on a variety of projects undertaken by Berkman Klein's Executive Director Urs Gasser, including but not limited to, a book project that explores the evolving role of law in the digital age and new modes of blended, multimodal governance. Additional research topics during the internship include privacy, comparative law, interoperability, and AI ethics & governance. Tasks include (a) research for a book and articles, (b) editorial work, and (c) general support on a range of international initiatives. This position requires high degrees of flexibility, strong communication skills, as well as the ability to find, absorb, critically analyze, and debate large amounts of written and other media materials from various sources. This position is an ideal opportunity for individuals interested in pursuing graduate or legal studies in the future, as well as those individuals currently enrolled in graduate or law school. Knowledge of foreign languages is a plus. More information about Urs’ research can be found at https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/ugasser.

The Library Innovation Lab explores intersections of technology, law and libraries. Each summer we welcome 2-3 Berkman Klein Center interns to collaborate on projects big and small with our band of developers, designers, lawyers and librarians. This summer, as part of our Caselaw Access Project, we’ll be experimenting with a huge new dataset of all US court decisions, working on an API to promote public access and research use of the data, and pursuing small discovery and demonstration projects to help illustrate the possible uses of this important dataset. We’re also working to transform textbooks and expand open educational resources through our H2O platform. And we’re building open source software called Perma.cc that helps scholars, courts and many others preserve web citations against link rot. Those are some of our big projects. We also have many other small sketches and explorations in motion all the time. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and perspectives who share our enthusiasm for this work. Technical expertise is great but not required. Please join us!

During a summer at Youth and Media (YaM), interns will contribute to a diverse, creative, and collaborative group that encompasses an array of research, advocacy, and development initiatives around youth (ages 12-18) and digital technology. Our project aims to gain detailed insights into youth media practices and digital fluencies, harness the associated opportunities, address challenges, and ultimately shape the evolving regulatory and educational framework in a way that advances the public interest. For 2020, we are looking for candidates with fresh ideas, serious curiosity, passion, and creative drive who 1) have interest and experience in qualitative research methods (e.g., listening to interviews, distilling highlights, transcript analysis) to assist with focus group interviews around topics such as privacy, the digital economy, and artificial intelligence, 2) are skilled in various types of writing (e.g., literature reviews, grant writing, memo writing, report writing, and newsletter writing), as well as copyediting, 3) are interested in designing creative learning tools for students of diverse backgrounds (please see here and here for examples of some of the educationals tools we have produced), and 4) ideally have an interest in graphic design, media production, and/or translating academic work for a broader public. Check out the following blog post and podcast, which explore the social dynamics of Instagram, to see an example of an output produced by our most recent cohort of YaM interns!