Cindy Lin (林凯莹) is an Assistant Professor and the 2026-2029 Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Faculty Fellow at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She is also the director of Critical Technocultures Lab. Prior to her professorship at Georgia Tech, she was an assistant professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the Department of Information Science. She was also a Digital Life Initiative Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech.
Her research examines the integral role of computing in addressing environmental challenges alongside inherent energy and resource constraints and societal impacts. Bridging Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Science and Technology Studies (STS), her ethnographic work centers on communities, public institutions, and data infrastructure across Southeast Asia and the United States, building socially responsible frameworks for understanding their engagement with the environment.
Cindy’s current book project is a 3-year-long ethnography of how research partnerships between Indonesian government research institutions and North American tech corporations, NGOs, and federal agencies develop data-intensive technologies and organizational structures to grapple with the fast-moving crises of environmental destruction, AI, and shifting public needs. It shows the displacement of institutional accountability as data-intensive technologies and organizational practices become increasingly tied to values of responsiveness and agility.
Her work has been published in leading computing venues including ACM CSCW, CHI, DIS, and PD and has been featured in Social Text and CoDesign. Her graduate studies and research have been funded by the Stephen Fleming Early Career Assistant Professorship, National Science Foundation, Dow Sustainability Fellows Program, Rackham Graduate School and the International Institute at the University of Michigan.
Cindy is the co-author of Technoprecarious, a multigraph written with Precarity Lab. She was also the co-director of DoIIIT, an interactive design and making studio. She holds a Ph.D. in Information from the School of Information (UMSI) and a graduate certificate from the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
︎ clin646@gatech.edu
Her research examines the integral role of computing in addressing environmental challenges alongside inherent energy and resource constraints and societal impacts. Bridging Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Science and Technology Studies (STS), her ethnographic work centers on communities, public institutions, and data infrastructure across Southeast Asia and the United States, building socially responsible frameworks for understanding their engagement with the environment.
Cindy’s current book project is a 3-year-long ethnography of how research partnerships between Indonesian government research institutions and North American tech corporations, NGOs, and federal agencies develop data-intensive technologies and organizational structures to grapple with the fast-moving crises of environmental destruction, AI, and shifting public needs. It shows the displacement of institutional accountability as data-intensive technologies and organizational practices become increasingly tied to values of responsiveness and agility.
Her work has been published in leading computing venues including ACM CSCW, CHI, DIS, and PD and has been featured in Social Text and CoDesign. Her graduate studies and research have been funded by the Stephen Fleming Early Career Assistant Professorship, National Science Foundation, Dow Sustainability Fellows Program, Rackham Graduate School and the International Institute at the University of Michigan.
Cindy is the co-author of Technoprecarious, a multigraph written with Precarity Lab. She was also the co-director of DoIIIT, an interactive design and making studio. She holds a Ph.D. in Information from the School of Information (UMSI) and a graduate certificate from the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
︎ clin646@gatech.edu