University Launches Penn Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy

The University of Pennsylvania today announced $10 million in funding dedicated to its new Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy. The Center, housed in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, will operate in partnership with the School of Arts & Sciences and four other schools at Penn.

It will benefit from a five-year, $5 million investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as well as an additional $5 million in combined resources from Penn Engineering, Penn Arts & Sciences, the Annenberg School for Communication, the Wharton School, Penn Carey Law School, and the School of Social Policy & Practice.

The new center is another step forward in the University’s efforts to employ data science to tackle the information deluge of the current moment, says Bhuvnesh Jain, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences and co-director of Penn Arts & Sciences’ Data Driven Discovery initiative (DDDI).

“There are strong and natural connections between what we do within DDDI and the work Duncan and Christopher have planned for this new initiative,” Jain explains. “In particular, fellows of the Center and DDDI fellows who work in psychology, linguistics, or sociology—and even our natural science fellows, who now use AI methods to jointly analyze text and images—will enjoy exchanging ideas.”

Click here for the full announcement.