Announcing The Handbook of Infrastructure Communication, published with Wiley! TIPI’s Keri Stephens and Kasey Faust worked with over 50 authors to establish infrastructure communication as a distinct interdisciplinary field that examines strategies for conveying complex infrastructure information across disciplines to facilitate understanding, decision-making, and action.

The book gives researchers, practitioners, and policymakers practical tools to improve how we plan, build, and talk about the systems everyone depends on.

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TIPI’s own Keri Stephens and Sharon Strover are among the UT Austin experts featured in Running With Scissors: AI and the Race for the Future, a documentary from Ethics Unwrapped at McCombs Business School exploring the ethical challenges of rapid AI development. The docuseries explores the potential harms of AI to society and the basic principles of AI ethics, tackling tough topics such as the impact of AI on creativity and copyright, the workforce, energy demand, and the environment.

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A central concern for researchers is how AI tools can be leveraged to help us better respond to disasters. But how can we use AI tools reliably in ways that also draw on human judgement? A new study from a multi-university team, including TIPI’s own Keri K. Stephens, explores that question through a system designed to help communities make faster, better evacuation decisions with AI input when flood waters rise.

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Dr. Sharon Strover, TIPI Co-Director, has received an IBM grant to publish a report in their series on the Business of Government. Her work, titled Training Local Government for Ethical AI Adoption, builds on the work with Good Systems that she and her colleagues have undertaken over several years.

The report will examine AI governance and training considerations within city governments to ensure responsible AI adoption and enhance public trust. The research investigates the range of city-based efforts to link AI capabilities to sensing and monitoring tasks. The report presents governance best practices, examines case studies from various cities, provides content for training, and addresses the community factors that cities must consider as they adopt AI tools. An ethical framework for creating effective AI capabilities will highlight these systems’ uses and suggest directions for future action.

Press coverage, op-eds, and public engagement featuring TIPI researchers.

Writing in Tech Policy Press, TIPI Co-Director Sharon Strover took on the recent standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon, in which the company refused to let its AI be used for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. On its face, she notes, the episode looks like a principled corporate stand. Strover argues that the real story is more complicated, since the United States already runs on a deep and largely normalized surveillance infrastructure, and framing the debate as one company being better or worse than another distracts from the harder question of who gets to set the terms. The answer should not rest with any single actor, state or corporate, but with democratic structures strong enough to govern the technologies now shaping our lives.

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When disaster strikes, we think of infrastructure as the roads, power lines, and water systems that fail us. But what if communication itself is the infrastructure that matters most? At the UTSA 2026 Spring Colloquium, TIPI Co-Director Keri K. Stephens made the case that effective communication is what determines whether communities survive and recover from extreme events, drawing on research spanning Hurricane Harvey, Winter Storm Uri, and the 2025 Central Texas floods. Her argument is a call to stop treating communication as an afterthought and recognize it as the connective tissue between technical systems, human behavior, and the policy decisions that shape how communities weather a crisis.

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How should everyday people navigate the AI tools they are increasingly asked to use? TIPI Co-Director Dr. Sharon Strover is helping answer that question with a forthcoming People's Guide to AI, slated for release in 2026. In a recent conversation with KXAN, Strover pointed to accountability and transparency as the enduring ethical foundations for AI use. She argued that the responsibility runs in both directions - users need to understand what these tools actually do, including the ways they can mislead and provide biased outputs, while the companies building AI tools need to be honest about how their systems work. Her core recommendation for the average user is a simple standard of transparency, being open about which tool you used, how you used it, and why.

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Students, fellows, and visitors.

This year, TIPI was proud to host Huijeong Yeon, a Fulbright scholar with eight years of experience in the South Korean government. Drawn to UT Austin by the interdisciplinary model of Good Systems, she spent the past year pairing her background in sociology and governance with the engineering and information systems work happening across campus, all in service of a more balanced approach to AI governance that weighs innovation against responsibility. In a wide-ranging interview, she reflected on South Korea's world-class digital infrastructure, the U.S. strength in building core AI models, and her hope to keep building bridges between the two countries long after her Fulbright term ends.

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Zhi Lin attended the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program (SDP), hosted by the University of Oxford in collaboration with the UC Berkeley School of Information from July 13–24, 2026. The two-week program brought together doctoral researchers for discussions on a wide range of topics related to AI and the Internet, while creating opportunities to build new research connections and collaborations. TIPI provided travel support for Lin’s participation in the program.

Keep Up with Her

This past May, TIPI awarded six graduate student fellowships to support the next generation of technology and policy research. Spanning questions from workplace AI and post-deployment accountability to digital equity and the ethics of emotional AI design, these projects reflect the range of issues shaping how people live and work alongside new technologies. The awarded fellows are Samia Ehsan, Yuting He, Yujin Lee, Yixuan Lui, Teniola Oralusi, and Ke Wu. We look forward to seeing how their work develops over the coming year and to sharing what they discover.

September 24-26, 2026 | Washington, D.C.

TIPI Co-Director Sharon Strover serves as Chair of the TPRC Board of Directors for TPRC54, The Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy. Held at American University Washington College of Law, the conference brings together researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and students to engage with research and policy issues related to communications, information, and technology.

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September 25, 2026 | College Station, TX

TIPI Co-Director Keri Stephens will speak at the Texas Weather Conference, presenting Weather and Flood Communication: From Forecast to Action.

October 2, 2026 | DMC 5.212

TIPI will hold an All-Hands Meeting & Research Updates session, bringing the TIPI research community together to share updates on current research and ongoing projects.

October 6, 2026 | Washington, D.C.

TIPI Postdoctoral Fellow Jianing Zhu, a researcher on the Being Watched project, will present a paper at Life After Data: the conference on de-datafication at Georgetown Law Center. The day-long conference will bring together researchers and other invited speakers to explore “de-datafication” and imagine futures in which digital data no longer mediates our social, economic, and political systems.

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October 14, 2026 | College Station, TX

TIPI Co-Director Keri Stephens will speak at the Texas Department of Transportation's 100th Short Course, presenting Going Beyond Turn Around Don’t Drown: Understanding Human Decisions and Communication for Desirable Actions.

October 14--17, 2026 | Mexico City, Mexico

TIPI Co-Director Sharon Strover will present two papers at AoIR 2026, the 27th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, held at the Hyatt Regency Mexico City. This year's conference, themed Regeneration(s), brings together internet researchers to explore technological, cultural, political, and social change. Strover's presentations, Surveillance Norms and U.S. Cities and Cities and AI: Colliding Values, both grow out of TIPI's work examining risk and AI.

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October 22, 2026 | San Antonio, TX

TIPI Co-Director Keri Stephens will serve as an invited panel member for the National Weather Service/NOAA Integrated Warning Team for Central Texas for a discussion on Communicating Flood Warnings Effectively.

October 30, 2026 | CMB 2.2112A

TIPI will hold its second fall All-Hands Meeting & Research Updates session to share research progress and updates across the TIPI community.

Publications from across the TIPI network

For the latest updates, check out our website!

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