[Access Lunch] Next Speaker: Lynn Kirabo

[Joon Jang]

Hello, hope everyone had a wonderful break! Picking back up - for this week’s Access Lunch, we’re excited to have Lynn Kirabo from CMU's TBD Lab as she previews work from her upcoming thesis defense.

As usual, we’ll have our session at Wed 3/15 noon-1PM at NSH 1109 and Zoom (cmu.zoom.us/j/99230267646?pwd=Q2pPRUtBQVJBd25lZmlpNjBYQTZGdz09). Food (pizza) will be provided!

Title: Forging a Path Toward Equity in Smart Public Transit Systems

Abstract
Public transit is the heartbeat of most cities around the world. It gives communities access to employment and services like health and education. Policy recommendations, interventions, and research on public transit often focus on drivers as the primary stakeholder. This same focus is evident in the recent proliferation of machine-learning interventions in public transit technologies. They neglect the influence and impact of these machine-learning interventions on other stakeholders in the public transit ecosystem. This focus runs the risk of automating inequities within future mobility systems.

In this dissertation, I argue that to design for equity in public transit, we should understand the broader public transit ecosystems in which we deploy transit AI technologies. My completed research studies traverse two geographic contexts, East Africa and North America. My work shows an underlying influence of trust on relationships within the ecosystem and unique stakeholder appropriation of transit technologies. Conversely, I also found a suspicion of advanced smart transit interfaces. Thus, I propose that to design for equity in smart transit systems, designers and researchers should consider two dimensions of trust: trust in the interfaces and trust between stakeholders within the ecosystem. My last work focuses on the first dimension, trust in the interface. I co-created the Jacaranda Framework --- a framework of concerns relevant to disabled riders' use of smart transit interfaces. I also demonstrated how principles from the framework could improve users' holistic experience with smart transit interfaces.

This thesis makes the following major contributions: 1) Establishes a multidimensional connection between Trust and Ecosystems, 2) Demonstrates a need to understand the entire ecosystem when considering new technologies, 3) Presents the Jacaranda Framework --- a framework of concerns relevant to disabled riders' use of smart transit interfaces, and 4) Demonstrates how methodologies can be adapted for research in these areas.

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Hope to catch you Wednesday!
Joon

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JiWoong (Joon) Jang, (he/him) - joonbug.me
Ph.D. Student, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University | School of Computer Science

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