Pitt joined a multi-institutional team researching the impact of AI on labor markets

On June 20, the University of Pittsburgh joined a collaborative effort to develop evidence-based foundations for understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on workers and labor markets. A $1.6 million gift from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has brought together Carnegie Mellon University and MIT — the co-lead institutions — plus Pitt’s School of Computing and Information, Northeastern University, the University of Virginia, the California Policy Lab and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

“As part of this multi-institution collaboration, I am leading a team of researchers from the Northeastern University and the University of Virginia to build the Observatory for U.S. Job Disruption,” explained Morgan Frank, an assistant professor in Pitt’s School of Computing and Information. “The Observatory will provide a new perspective on unemployment across the U.S. and support empirically grounded discussions of job loss from, for example, AI, the energy transition, global pandemics or trade policy. 

“Currently, federal agencies report total unemployment for U.S. states and sub-state regions, but it is difficult to know which sectors, occupations or populations are contributing to those aggregated statistics ... We are solving this problem by collaborating with each U.S. state's unemployment insurance program to collect the counts of unemployment claimants, including their most-recent sector and occupation of employment.”

This, combined with employment statistics, will allow researchers to calculate workers’ unemployment risk based on their role in their local economy.