In the summer of 2020, in the midst of the great tragedy and uncertainly of a global pandemic, I applied to participate in TechCongress. I was one of six technologists honored with the opportunity to serve in the US Congress for the 2021 year as a Congressional Innovation Fellow. Experiencing up-close-and-personal the many challenges and opportunities of developing tech policy in the US Senate has been an extraordinary experience, and the (still growing) TechCongress community continues to inspire me. Read more about what inspired me to work in Congress.
Technology touches virtually all areas of life and every issue before Congress. TechCongress gives talented technologists the opportunity to gain first-Āhand experience in federal policymaking and shape the future of tech policy through our fellowships with Members of Congress and Congressional Committees.
Since I started the fellowship in January 2021, Iāve had people reach out to me interested in applying to the program. While I am only one person from a diverse cohort of Fellows, I thought it might be helpful to share what I wrote in my application for future aspiring Congressional Innovation Fellows and more. If you're interested in applying to TechCongress, I highly recommend checking out the fantastic resources and information sessions hosted by the fellowship selection team.
What follows are the unfiltered answers from my application to the 2021 Congressional Innovation Fellowship. Looking back, there are some things I would probably do differently (I'd never written a memo before in my life)! Many of these answers may be out-of-date regarding both my current skills and goals as well as the TechCongress Fellowship's application questions, but I hope they might be useful as a reference.
Application to the 2021 TechCongress Congressional Innovation Fellowship
Show off your skills! You can add up to three website links including LinkedIn, GitHub, a portfolio website, or anything else that showcases your abilities.
Please list or describe your technical skills and any relevant training
IBM Certified Watson Application Developer, Certified Design Thinking Facilitator, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) subject matter expert, Public Education, Community Building, Cybersecurity, Public Speaking, Leadership, Project Management.
I am a dabbler in a variety of programming languages, but find myself doing more high level project management and strategy work.
Name three Members of Congress you think you might like to work for
Lloyd Doggett, Joaquin Castro, Elizabeth Warren
Rapid changes in technology have created a number of challenges for Congress. You are working in a Senatorās office and have been asked to write a memo about a technology policy issue. Remarkably, the issue you've been asked to write about is an issue that you have experience with, but in which the Senator and his or her staff have very little expertise. (You can also pick an issue that you may have less experience with but that you find interesting and think is important for Congress.) Describe 1) the nature of the problem, and its significance (while taking care to explain any complex technical concepts) and 2) your solution and recommended course of action to advance your solution
TOPIC:
Facial Recognition research threatens US foreign policy interests in China and elsewhere
BACKGROUND:
Facial Recognition software is a technology that enables automated identification and categorization of people based on visually apparent features like phenotype or individual unique digital āface prints.ā Facial recognition is a rapidly advancing technology despite requiring large amounts of facial image data to produce and poor performance on some populations (such as women and people with darker skin). It is a field that has drawn a lot of attention and research investment including by our military.
The most common application of facial recognition software is for surveillance. In China, this technology has been deployed to commit human rights abuses against Uyghur muslim ethnic minority in the western Xinjiang region where hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to be held in detention camps and many more are tracked with intrusive surveillance.
ISSUE:
US research fundingāincluding from military branches such as the Air Force and Navyāhas been connected to research collaborations with Chinese state-sponsored companies implicated in human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region. The links to abuse in China are increasingly well-documented, so in the last two years, restrictive actions have been taken including additions to the US Dept of Commerce Entity List for known specific actors, but facial recognition research investments continue to pose a foreign policy threat.
Additionally, connections between US-funded facial recognition research and oppressive regimes elsewhere remain poorly understood and present both a foreign policy risk and strategic misallocation of resources.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
1) INVESTIGATE the connections between foreign (state and non-state) research partnerships and US government funding in surveillance technologies such as facial recognition to identify additional sources of conflict.
2) MANDATE risk assessment statement in all government-funded research that acknowledges both misuse and failure modes as potential dangers.
3) RECOMMEND a halt to government-funded facial recognition research due to the strategic risks it presents.
Explain your reasons for wanting to be a Congressional Innovation Fellow. How will the fellowship 1) improve your capacity to effect change and 2) fit with your career plans?
So far in my career, Iāve worked in literal garage startups and massive multinational corporations, in academic environments and in nonprofits. All of this experience has reaffirmed to me that it is essential to the well-being of our country and our planet that our government have both the expertise and the capacity for tech-informed leadership. I donāt want to sit by the sidelines and wish that our government was better equipped to address the fast-moving issues that technology sparks. I want to be part of the solution.
I want to better understand the realities that congresspeople face and the opportunities to affect change on issues that are important to me: health & disability justice, security & privacy, shared prosperity, and our environment. I know that firsthand experience working in government will help me drive positive change and inform my decision on where my abilities can do the most good.
Tell us about your qualifications for the Congressional Innovation Fellowship. Think about highlighting how your strengths and experience ā including technical knowledge and skills ā will help you to succeed in the program and in Congress.
I work as a program lead in a multistakeholder nonprofit with many of the biggest names in tech, academia, and civil society. My specialty is translating between contexts and facilitating important conversations across philosophical and professional divides. My research specifically centers on the impacts of technology on society including issues like automation & employment and how artificial intelligence (AI) may present risks including making it easy to create and spread misinformation.
I bring to this work my experience working at IBM in the AI implementations division, where I advised international corporate and government leaders on the impacts of technology. There, I also founded and led an educational group, upskilling >40 colleagues (designers to data scientists) on deep learning technology.
A community-builder at heart, Iām eager to contribute my skills to the civic leadership of this country and look forward to facilitating new connections between government and the communities we serve.
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This post was originally shared on the TechCongress blog under the titleĀ Meet the Fellows 2021: B Cavello. To apply to TechCongress, visit techcongress.io/apply. You can also read B's answers to the 2021 application as a reference.
In many ways, working for the government on tech policy issues seems like a far-off fantasy that I never would have imagined becoming real. In other ways, it feels almost like fate.
My career up until joining TechCongress has taken many turns. Iāve worked in literal garage startups and massive multinational corporations, in academic environments and in nonprofits. Iāve had the privilege of working alongside countless brilliant people advancing work on important, world-changing issues. Iām grateful to have been afforded the opportunity to peer behind the curtain at the inner workings of so many of the different systems that power our world. And yet, thereās been a massive gap in my experience: one of the most powerful institutions of them all, the United States government.
If Iām honest, Iād all but written off government work. Sure, Iāve known friends with ambitions of making their way into an executive branch appointment or public defenders toiling for justice, but I never imagined a place like Congress had a place for me. As a nonbinary person, a person without advanced degrees, a person who worked at a company with āExplodingā in the name (let alone āExploding Kittens!ā), I had somewhat unconsciously come to think of Congress as outside the bounds of possibility for me.
At the same time, it also feels logical that I would be here, doing this work.
After all, Phenomenon Media 501c3, the tech education nonprofit I co-founded right after finishing university was in many ways inspired by Congress. The infamous āseries of tubesā comments from 2006 had served as a wake-up call that this nation needed greater literacy around tech issues and had fueled my dive into learning about internet infrastructure and information security. Working on developing toys and tools to teach people about technology in new ways gave me opportunities to relate sometimes abstract tech topics to peopleās real lives and experiences and to foster communities in the process.
Over a decade after the āseries of tubes,ā the notorious āSenator, we run adsā testimony from 2018 further fueled my drive to play a positive role in technology governance. Working in IBM Watson implementations gave me insight into the many challenges that companies and governments alike face in adapting to technological change well as the potential opportunities and harms of AI. As a program lead at the Partnership on AI I got to apply these insights, leading multi-stakeholder research with leaders at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the ACLU, UNI Global Union, and others. These collaborations developed my experience translating between contexts and facilitating important conversations across philosophical and professional divides. So many of these conversations pointed back to Congress. Even with so many good-hearted people who want technology to be better and to do better, I frequently encountered frustrations that our government was not acting quickly enough or strategically enough when it came to tech policy issues. It almost became a joke that the end of every conversation would conclude that āreally, itās up to policymakersā to take action and define the landscape for responsible technology development.
All of these experiences reaffirmed to me that it is essential to the well-being of our country (and our planet!) that our government has both the expertise and the capacity for tech-informed leadership. Thatās why I was so excited to learn about and ultimately have the opportunity to take part in the Congressional Innovation Fellowship. Because, thanks to TechCongress, there is a place in Congress for people with experiences like mine. Iām eager to better understand the realities that congresspeople face and affect change on issues that are important to me: health & disability justice, security & privacy, shared prosperity, and our environment.
Given my circuitous career path, I donāt know what the future will hold. However, I do know that firsthand experience working in government will help me drive positive change and inform my decision on where my abilities can do the most good. I am not going to sit by the sidelines and wish that our government was better equipped to address the fast-moving issues that technology sparks. With TechCongress, I am going to be part of the solution.
