The Meaning of Tech for Social Good
Hack4Impact UIUC Alumni Spotlight
“Hack4Impact has been the most transformative and rewarding part of my college experience. I’ve been able to grow myself as a person and push my technical skills in a passionate community that truly cares about social good.” — Neeraj Aggarwal, Hack4Impact Software Developer
“Working with people at Hack4Impact really improved my empathy and inspired me to truly think about the end users when building software, putting user experience as top priority and building true human-centric solutions.” — Philip Kuo, Hack4Impact Product Designer
Over the course of only 4 semesters, the UIUC chapter of Hack4Impact has blossomed to over 30 students. As the community has grown in size and spirit, I was inspired to take a step back and sit down with the person who made all these opportunities possible.
Here is my conversation with Hack4Impact UIUC’s Co-Founder Alvin Wu where we go deeper into hearing his story and understanding what tech for social good means to him.
Alvin Wu co-founded Hack4Impact UIUC in Fall 2017 along with Varun Munjeti. In addition to leading the UIUC chapter, Alvin spearheaded the first chapter project with Neighborhood News Bureau as Product Manager. Currently, he is working full-time as a Software Engineer at Fitbit.
Q: How was your undergraduate experience at UIUC?
“I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot about building technology and about myself as well. I stayed on campus for five years and did a joint bachelors-masters in ECE. I graduated December of 2017. Between graduating and starting work I focused a lot on growing Hack4Impact, scaling the organization, and creating a solid foundation for the future.”
Q: During your undergrad, you were part of a research group that created prosthetics for amputees. Can you tell me more about that?
“I got really lucky during my first semester of freshman year. I attribute a lot of my later wins and opportunities to this one opportunity I stumbled upon. There was an event called 54io, a 54 hours startup weekend. It sounded cool and I went by myself. I ended up meeting this guy named Logan who was a mechanical engineer doing a cool robotics project. Even as a freshman with no coding experience, he was very nice and was like, ‘Come and learn a lot!’ After that weekend, I became pretty good friends with him. From that chance encounter of me going that weekend, I was able to join the Bretl research group.”
Q: What was your role in the research group?
“During my first semester with them, I worked on a lot of electronics. I actually came into college as an electrical engineering major. After that semester, I switched to computer engineering and wanted to focus a lot more on software. So then I worked on some machine learning to process those signals and recognize hand gestures.
That research group was my first exposure to using technology for some kind of social impact. No longer was I just building toy robots. It was combining my passion for building things and doing good.
The other aspect was a lot of the technical skills and working on a team with other people who were just as passionate about this tech for good space was very refreshing. That was the one of the premises for starting Hack4Impact as well — building a community of similar-minded people who are interested in both technology and doing something that helps people with that technology.”
Q: What does social good mean to you?
“I think social good is all about improving human lives. I really want to leverage what I know to help people who are less fortunate around the world. Growing up, I realized I grew up in a more fortunate atmosphere. I am very cognizant of that, and I know I am lucky. It is very unfair to all the others who have so many struggles growing up. Because I was more fortunate, I feel I have an obligation to use my skills to give back. On the other hand, you can continue to use your fortune to amass more wealth, start the 20th scooter company out there to make more money.
I think it’s much more fulfilling when you’re leveraging those skills to help others around the world.”
Q: Who do you think can contribute to social good?
“Anyone can. Part of the mission of Hack4Impact is to show engineers that they are not limited to ‘regular’ tech companies that often don’t even have social impact as one of their top three pillars.
However, it’s not just limited to engineers.
There’s a lot of things that you can do to make a better place. It’s not only skill-based, which is a lot of what Hack4Impact is. Using your skills to make a community or world better. Even doing small fundraisers and volunteering your time more to places where they might need those resources is a perfect way to give back.”
Q: What got you into your passion for building things?
“My dad was an engineer which was probably my main inspiration. I knew I wanted to do something like that, but I wasn’t really sure what kind of engineering. AP CS wasn’t taught well at my high school. It actually made me not want to do computer science. I think that resonates with a lot of people. I never really considered CS in university. While software is a really accessible and a low barrier way to build things today, it’s not the only way. My current path is leaning towards product management where you get to drive the high level building of a product.”
Q: So you’re currently working at Fitbit, what drew you to working there?
“I’ve interned there for the past two summers. I first decided to intern at Fitbit because their mission is very impactful. Fitbit’s mission is all about empowering others to reach better health outcomes. It’s about changing user behavior to help them live healthier lives. This focus on health stood out to me as something I can see myself being passionate about as opposed to building drones or B2B web apps (which are very important as well!). Health is one of the top three worries for most people over the age of 16. It’s an amazing thing to say that you helped millions of people reach their weight loss goals or helped them sleep better at night.”
Q: Right now, you’re also part of a data fellow program. Can you tell me more about that?
“I’m a teaching fellow for a nonprofit called Delta Analytics. Our whole mission is to democratize artificial intelligence. As a teaching fellow, we’re building this accessible machine learning curriculum. It’s this whole idea of teaching machine learning for ‘good’ and building technical capacity for nonprofits and underserved students. We believe data is a very powerful. There’s a fear that a lot of the big companies are monopolizing all this data. Those companies have so much data right now, and it’s very hard for smaller companies to compete. It’s not just about companies though.
Data education should be available to everyone so they can see where they can make change in their community.
The curriculum is supposed to be very accessible. It defers from a machine learning curriculum you find at UIUC or online at Coursera. All of those require a pretty heavy math background or CS backgrounds. The curriculum we’re building is a very low barrier to entry to understand a lot of data concepts and kickstart people who don’t have any background in this and start using data to do stuff in their community. We teach local nonprofits and partner with international organizations.”
Q: How have you been shaping the curriculum?
“A lot of our core curriculum was built the past year. Now we’re doing minor adjustments to it. For these next few months, we’re looking at how to present this material to help people learn this stuff better. There’s this educational concept called active learning.
How we learn at college is this professor having these slides and going over those slides. But active learning is all about engaging the students in different ways. At our meeting last week, we brought a whole bunch of board games and combined many of them to build some interactive game to teach some machine learning concept. It was a lot of design thinking.”
