Building the civic infrastructure of the AI era.
AI is being deployed across the systems that shape public life: courts, classrooms, benefits offices, hiring pipelines, the news people read and the information they’re told to trust. The insinuation of AI everywhere is happening faster than the institutions built to govern them can respond, and much faster than the public is now only beginning to understand.
NYU Civic Tech Initiative aims to close this gap.
We investigate AI systems operating in the public sphere, build tools that promote civic life, and build a public infrastructure that AI is quietly rewriting.
We work across three pillars:
AI Accountability.
We investigate and audit the AI systems making consequential decisions in public-facing institutions: hiring, lending, policing, education, government services and newsrooms. We produce the research, methods, and reporting tools that make these systems legible to journalists, regulators, civil society and the public.
Civic Infrastructure.
Public life runs on shared infrastructure: information environments, government services and public records. We partner with newsrooms, agencies and civic organizations to rebuild that infrastructure for a world where AI is the default mediator between people and what they need to know.
Tools for Civic Good.
We build what’s missing: open-source tools, models, datasets and platforms that use AI in the public interest. Tools for journalists covering complex stories, for civil society monitoring institutional power, for public servants delivering services and for communities navigating a new information environment.
NYU Civic Tech Initiative is grounded in the conviction that the choices being made right now — about which AI systems get deployed, by whom, on what terms and with what oversight — will shape democratic life for generations. We’re here to make sure those choices are made in public, with evidence, and with the public’s interest at the center.
Hilke Schellmann, Founder, Professor, Investigative Journalist
Hilke is an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, thought leader and journalism professor at NYU (currently on leave working with computer scientist Arvind Narayanan at Princeton’s CITP). For the past eight years, as a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review and The Guardian, Schellmann has written about holding artificial intelligence (AI) accountable. In her award-winning book, The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired, And Why We Need To Fight Back, which the NYTimes called one of the best five books on AI, she investigates the rise of AI in the world of work. Through her academic collaborations investigating real world problems, Hilke has created new scientific knowledge and more authoritative journalism. She has spearheaded new methods to hold AI accountable and has built better tools for journalism. She will spend the 2025-26 academic year working closely with Arvind Narayanan at Princeton’s Center for Information, Technology and Policy, building out IPTPI as a fellow.
Aimee Rinehart, Founder, Frontier Collective
Aimee is focused on shaping the future of journalism through strategic, collaborative innovation. She was most recently a Senior Product Manager for AI Strategy at the Associated Press where she led cross-functional initiatives that integrated generative AI into news and operational workflows with journalistic integrity. She co-founded Humans in the Loop, a networking group for news innovators that meets regularly. She spearheaded collaborative initiatives on verification of online content in Brazil, France, the U.K., and the U.S. Aimee serves on the board for the Page Center at Penn State. Her work foregrounds agency, accountability and human-centered design in news and technology.
Nikita Roy, Founder & Podcast Host, Newsroom Robots Lab
Nikita is a data scientist, journalist and Harvard-recognized AI futurist. She is the founder of Newsroom Robots Lab, an AI training and advisory firm for media organizations, currently incubating at Harvard Innovation Labs. She also hosts Newsroom Robots, a globally charting podcast on AI and the future of journalism. As a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists, she trained thousands of journalists across six continents to accelerate AI adoption in journalism, including launching the AI Journalism Lab at the City University of New York, supported by Microsoft. Nikita also serves on the national board of the Canadian Association of Journalists and is co-chair of its 2026 national conference in Ottawa. She was named one of twelve pioneers and power players shaping the future of news in the 2025 Future Today Strategy Group Tech Trends Report.
