At Northeastern’s Vancouver, Seattle, Oakland and Silicon Valley campuses, Edmunds is redefining computer science as a human-centered discipline.
Growing up, Bethany Edmunds always looked up to her older brother. When he liked the computer programming classes he was taking in high school, that was enough for her to take them too. Plus, her family had a computer at home.
“I’m old enough that this was before the PC,” she says. “So I was comfortable with computers.”
Twenty years ago in graduate school at Rutgers, Edmunds studied computer science with a focus on machine learning — a background that now seems tailor-made for her role as Northeastern University’s associate dean of computing programs on the West Coast, where she oversees campuses in Vancouver, Seattle, Oakland and Silicon Valley.
Teaching on the Vancouver campus, Edmunds says she’s always been mindful that what feels intuitive to her as a computer scientist may not be familiar or accessible to others.
“I recognized the gaps between technology, academia and the real world,” she says, “maybe because my parents never finished college, and always wanted to be the bridge to provide a better life for people left behind because of those gaps.”
Closing those gaps has always been the mission of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Edmunds says. At Northeastern, the belief that computer science is for everyone means not only that people from all social backgrounds should be developing software, but also that those developers must understand the broader impact of their work.
This mandate — to ensure that computer science is not exclusionary and does not create harm — takes on new urgency in the age of AI, Edmunds says. Artificial intelligence has an impact that people may not always see, she says, and has the power to modify human behavior.
“Northeastern has a really important role to play in making sure that the decisions technologists are making for other people, and the influence that they have on everyday lives, are done knowingly and ethically,” she says. “We think of it as a math problem, but software actually changes people’s well-being.”
As part of a delegation representing Canada, Edmunds recently returned from Viva Tech, a tech conference in Paris. Before that, she participated in the Web Summit in Vancouver where she provided thought leadership on the benefits and risks of AI.
She believes AI systems will be stronger and more equitable when their training data includes a broader range of perspectives beyond those of the majority.
“If someone is on the margins, they’re not in the majority so they are going to be left out,” she said on a Web Summit panel. “We have to actively make sure we’re not leaving out humanity and the rich tapestry that is who we are by having AI complete our sentences or draw our pictures or create our art.”
Computer science isn’t just about computers and science anymore. It’s also about ethics, Edmunds says.
“Software and data are part of the human experience,” she says. “What we’re building isn’t purely technical anymore, and so we have to be able to think larger, because the tools we’re building are larger.”
As a professor, Edmunds prioritizes exposing her graduate students to real-world, client-center experiences. Through a community-driven software development initiative she leads with visiting professor Yvonne Coady, students partner with nonprofits to build tools that support their missions.
This spring, students collaborated with a nonprofit that supports people with dyslexia, creating a web browser extension that gives users greater control over text readability.
A central goal of the course is helping students learn how to communicate and collaborate with clients who may not have a technical background — bridging the gap between developers and end users.
In this case, students worked closely with an advocate for dyslexic computer users who helped articulate the community’s specific needs.
“Developers and some of these populations run in very different circles,” Edmunds says.“Cutting-edge technology is so far from these populations, but it could help in a lot of ways.”