Julia Ticona, assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School, and her research partner Chris Callison-Burch, associate professor of computer and information science at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, recently received funding for their study through a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a $2.5 million collaborative grant that involves scholars from Carnegie-Mellon, Penn State, Penn and West Virginia State. Penn’s portion of the grant is about $375,000.

They will study the Future of Work on the Human-Technology Frontier, one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas announced in 2016. The grant aims to bring together researchers from computer science and the social sciences to undertake a variety of studies focused on the hidden workers and infrastructures that power artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace. The grant is meant to catalyze interdisciplinary research that examines the benefits and risks of the technological transformation of work.

Drawing on Dr. Callison-Burch’s expertise in crowdsourcing and AI and Dr. Ticona’s research about cultures of low-wage work and the politics of digital labor platforms, the pair will explore social and computational approaches to improving worker wages, pricing transparency and the meaning of access to digital work for marginalized urban and rural communities.