Our Mission

Affiliated with Penn State University, X-Lab’s vast portfolio of research interests include:

  • Designing, developing and presenting reliable analyses models for accurately mapping broadband speeds and price elasticity across the U.S. down to the district and county levels.
  • Identifying potentially dangerous or harmful privacy and surveillance approaches and highlighting flaws or vulnerabilities in these as they pertain to civil liberties, equality and equity in society, anticipating the disruptions and potentially dystopian outcomes of various policy options to help change course by suggesting tangible, actionable policy and regulatory responses.
  • Studying the implications for disruptive eventualities such as the upheaval of the traditional manufacturing chain brought about by distributed manufacturing; the electromagnetic jaywalking becoming prevalent with software defined radios; the impacts of a new form of digital feudalism – an “Internet of Things” that lacks consumer protections; or, the need for transectoral interoperability to create truly “smart” infrastructure.

Linking Policy and Tech

X-Lab is uniquely positioned to influence decision-making from a decidedly hands-on, pragmatic vantage point, and operates as an open sandbox seamlessly bringing together top technology and policy experts for targeted initiatives enabling a rapid, practical and effective deployment and spin-off of projects and action plans.

The lines are continuously blurring between technology, law, and policy as more and more facets of our lives – the ways we live, learn, work and communicate – have become completely computer-mediated. Today, norms about how we interact with technology – and increasingly, how technology interacts with us – are being made by corporate, technocratic stakeholders who will set the trajectory of society for decades to come.

These decisions must be informed by and built upon a principled and ethical stance, not merely short-term profit, market forces and political expediency. Otherwise, these same stakeholders are in danger of rendering fundamental human rights obsolete through their actions and inaction. X-Lab combines the technological acumen of global experts across a variety of domains to analyze the implications of near-future technological breakthroughs and formulates positive intervention strategies for the current and future tech-policy battles.

X-Lab leverages a pragmatic, unified and holistic approach to better tech policy, and does so through a non-partisan, inclusive and grassroots practice.

X-Lab is a fervent supporter of and participant in the open source, open standards and open data movements. All of our work follows these principles and we strive to make our research available and understandable to everyone.