

About the Tech for Humanity Lab
The Tech for Humanity Lab is a transdisciplinary laboratory at Virginia Tech, focusing on the impact of technology on the human condition. Our lab emphasizes issues of human security broadly constituting political, medical, social, economic and environmental securities. The lab utilizes transdisciplinary research, combining practices from political science, international affairs, law, computer science, humanities, engineering, business, biology, public health, and area studies.
Our mission includes investigating the impact of technological advances on a broad spectrum of security issues. Early research initiatives include surveillance, censorship, data manipulation and misuse, and misappropriation for the purposes of impacting human security across and within multiple disciplines. The lab provides access to resources including High Performance Computing; mobile and IoT technologies; servers, software and simulations for modeling infrastructures; augmented and virtual environments; and a range of digital devices. The lab places concerns of human security at its core and seeks to develop technical- and policy-relevant research that might guide future innovation in ways that minimize negative impacts and enhance a comprehensive approach to technology and human security.




Aaron F. Brantly – Director

Nataliya D. Brantly – Lab Deputy Director

By Cristalia Laing Abstract Nigeria and Kenya are the among the first African states to develop legislative frameworks that address the rise in cyberthreats. While innovative, they have been documented to have implementation gaps that weaken state protection of free expression, privacy, and other civil liberties. This paper is a comparative analysis of Kenya and Nigeria’s…

By Andrew Brantly My name is Andrew Brantly, and I am 14 years old. I am a freshman at Blacksburg High School. I am currently taking AP Computer Science A. In this class, I am learning to program in Java. We started with the basics, including the “Hello World” code snippet that defines every first-time…

By Aaron Brantly The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in the United States and the subsequent policy positions espoused by his administration should constitute a wake-up call to the entirety of Europe on the importance of quickly and effectively establishing digital sovereignty. Where once the United States sought to work within an established…

Tech for Humanity Lab
Major Williams Hall 117