By SHANNON O. WELLS
A collaborative project between the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Hero Fund and Pitt’s Responsible Data Science Initiative aims to make the Hero Fund’s 121 years of data on heroes and their selfless actions available to researchers and those interested in studying altruism and its societal relevance.
While Michael Colaresi, Pitt’s associate vice provost for data science, acknowledges it as a “unique opportunity to work at the intersection of people and data,” he also wants to know why that is the case.
“It struck me that it shouldn’t be unique,” he said. “I work with data on the darker side of things — often, like, every day. When I was first talking to Eric Zahren (president and board chair of the Hero Fund) about this, I was like, ‘Why is this so rare? Why is this so unique? Why?’
“I go to meetings with thousands of people to talk about fatalities of political violence, for example. But go try to find the same type of examples for heroism and extreme altruism,” he continued. “It doesn’t exist yet. And we’re going to build towards that.”
Led by Colaresi and Zahren, the Carnegie HERO (Hero-Inspired Education and Research Outreach) Initiative is a three-year project funded jointly by the Hero Fund and Carnegie Corporation of New York. It is housed within the broader, newly created Roddey Altruism Program, which seeks to build a thriving interdisciplinary community centered on the study of altruism and heroic acts as a way to combat hate-based radicalism and demonstrate that “peace is possible.”
The Hero Fund, which is based in Pittsburgh, and Pitt’s Data Science department seek to launch and expand the HERO Data Platform, broaden a cross-disciplinary research and education network, and “humanize the data” through narrative and community engagement.
The Carnegie Medal is given throughout the U.S. and Canada to those who risk death or serious physical injury to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save the lives of others. Grants totaling more than $45 million have gone to awardees or their survivors and include scholarship aid, continuing assistance and death benefits.
Developing a new open-access digital portal is intended to make the Hero Fund’s “rich trove of data” — related to more than 100,000 instances of nominated heroic action and associated narratives — available to researchers, educators and the public worldwide, the initiative announcement from the Office of the Provost said.
The portal will include structured documentation, interactive notebooks and onboarding tools to support new users and “foster meaningful engagement” across various fields. Other altruism-centered organizations will be invited to share their data.
“Through the wide-ranging study of what is likely the world’s largest records repository related to extreme human altruism, and utilizing modern AI-centered technology,” Zahren said, “we are hoping, for the first time, to be able to mine integral data for the various study fields examining altruism as a possibility within human behavior, and how it applies to societal issues.”
A higher purpose
Colaresi credited Zahren with providing the spark for the project, for which funding started in July.
“He, in talking to me, communicated that in this age where there’s a lot of partisan rancor and distrust and anxiety and concern, he was — I don’t know if ‘comfort’ is the right word — but inspired to go back to Andrew Carnegie’s sort of original intent for the Hero Commission and the awards … rewarding people for doing great acts to strangers and doing amazing things for people that they don’t know and could disagree with,” he said. “And (recognizing) that there’s some common humanity in that, which the commission is set up to help support and foster.”
Perhaps more fundamentally, Carnegie “wanted these stories told” so that when people won awards, their stories would be shared through newspaper articles and other media in major cities.
“That spoke to, I think, a higher purpose with the commission, to sort of reminding us of who we are,” Colaresi explained. “And that was just really, really inspiring to me.”
The Hero Fund recently recognized 17 individuals, including two dads who died saving their children from drowning, a 13-year-old boy who saved his brother and mom from an attacking dog, and three individuals, who, in separate acts, pulled people from the paths of oncoming trains.
Colaresi said Zahren and Dave Hickton, founding director of Pitt’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security who also serves on the Carnegie Heroes Fund Commission, “helped bridge this partnership.”
“I saw that Responsible Data Science here in the provost’s office was a place where I think we could have the data acumen to launch a public portal — a data platform for wire sharing of this information — while at the same time doing community engagement and outreach and making sure that what needed to stay private would be private,” he said, referring to the need for sensitivity regarding the personal nature of some acts. “When these heroic acts are dramatic, in many cases, these are the worst days of these people’s lives, because they went through trauma to help save someone.
“We are very sensitive to that, that the data isn’t (just) data. Data is about people, and the power in data science is how it leaps off the screen and not when it’s trapped in the computer,” he added. “One of the things I think that makes this partnership so exciting is that we’re focusing on the human elements of this for inspiration.”
Common ground
According to the Carnegie’s Hero Fund mission statement, the fund, administered by a 21-member commission, was charged with honoring those Andrew Carnegie called the “heroes of civilization.” Their lifesaving actions put them in “stark contrast” to the “heroes of barbarism, (who) maimed or killed” their fellow man.
“That the mission of the Hero Fund as set forth by Carnegie is unchanged over more than a century, despite massive upheaval in the social and world order, is testament both to his foresight and to essentially unchanging human nature,” the statement reads.
As far as the initiative rollout this summer, Colaresi said some staff have been hired “to fill roles to build the data platform.
“There’s been outreach to researchers around the world to convene this research group and grow a research group around extreme altruism and altruistic acts,” he said. “There’s been a lot of work on what is available and what’s the structure of the data and the database right now and how do we get that into the structure we need?”
Colaresi noted that one of the broader impacts of focusing on extreme altruistic acts is “that there’s something common. Carnegie also said, when he set this up, that anyone could potentially be like a hero. It’s an impulsive thing to risk your life to save someone,” he said.
Carnegie also didn’t set up the commission to incentivize heroism “because he thought it was (something) that any of us could do in that moment, but instead to support the people that suffered, potentially, or the families that suffered from these acts,” Colaresi added. “It was about helping and about remembering how we help each other. And I love that focus.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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