Matthew Bilik
bilik at uw dot edu * bilik at cs dot washington dot edu
Hi - I am a first-year Ph.D. student in human-centered design and engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington where I am advised by Dr. Emily Tseng (HCDE) and Dr. Amy Zhang (CSE). My research is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the UW College of Engineering Dean's Fellowship.
I am interested in applying critical, reflective social science to AI. I am particularly interested in the physical infrastructure that supports AI, the views and practices of researchers and engineers, the AI moment’s historical roots, and AI's implications for security and privacy. I use my findings from this work to inform technology policy. I am also interested in designing and building thoughtful alternatives to AI infrastructures and techniques (e.g., data cooperatives) that allow us to realize AI's potential to advance human flourishing. In this line of work, I develop prototypes through community-engaged, participatory methods.
I am a graduate of the University of Michigan where I studied computer science and sociology (the latter with high honors), and completed a minor in science, technology, and society studies. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on data privacy discourses in the 1965 and 1966 Hearings on the Computer and Invasion of Privacy. I am a former data editor, managing online editor, and data journalist at The Michigan Daily.
Privy: Envisioning and Mitigating Privacy Risks for Consumer-facing AI Product Concepts
To appear in CHI '26, Barcelona, Spain.
Cool Corridor Router (CoCo)
CoCo is an urban heat digital twin and Python routing library.
What to know about GEO’s pay demands: An in-depth analysis of graduate student pay
Visualizations with Datawrapper.
The Michigan Daily interactive career map
The Michigan Daily surveyed its staffers to learn where they interned or worked this summer. From New York to Hong Kong, in journalism and out of it, here are the results.
2022 Primary Election Voter Guide
Built with React, ArchieML, and an AWS CloudFormation stack. Maps produced with D3, GDAL, Turfpy, and Folium.
More than 100 Ann Arbor restaurants closed in the past three years. How have these closures affected the community?
Data scraped from Washtenaw County's restaurant inspection portal. Restaurant centroids repositioned with QGIS and mapped using building extent boundaries from Ann Arbor's open data portal. Part of a several month investigation into restaurant closures in Ann Arbor following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Won SPJ Mark of Excellence in Food and Restaurant Journalism.
2022 Michigan regular and special election results: Democrat flips seat in GOP stronghold
Made with Folium and Leaflet for Michigan's May 3rd special congressional election. Data sourced from Michigan's open data portal. HTML edited to remove tileset and add legend.
The 2022 Orientation Edition
Made with React. Efficient resource allocation with an interaction observer, PDF rendering.
How has Ann Arbor's climate changed in the last two decades?
I used Google Earth Engine, GDAL (a projection CLI-tool), ai2html, high spatial resolution Landsat 8 satellite data, and high temporal resolution MODIS Terra satellite data to compile and visualize a two-decade history of heat in Ann Arbor. I also analyzed the University of Michigan's building-by-building heat resilience by bounding surface heat data to building land use.
Whitmer’s new budget proposal: What it means for Michigan residents
Visualizations with Datawrapper.
A look back at eight years of UMich under former U-M President Mark Schlissel