Research Interests: Environmental history; history of conservation science and ecology; political ecology; science & technology studies.

Matt is a doctoral student in the History of Science Department. His ongoing research mobilizes historical and ethnographic methods to understand the uptake of advanced computational technologies in environmental sciences. He also draws on information infrastructure studies and the political economy of science to understand how market-academia dynamics shape environmental knowledge production.

Publications:

Lukacz, P.M. (2022). Data Capitalism, Microsoft’s Planetary Computer, and the Biodiversity Informatics Community. In: Smits, M. (eds.) Information for a Better World: Shaping the Global Future. iConference 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13192. Springer.

Presentations:

2021, “AI against Extinction: Towards the History of Conservation by Algorithm.” Paper presented at the Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power Winter Symposium, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

2021, "Predicting Weather with a Trustworthy AI: Analyzing Private-Public Technology Development Partnership through Sociology of Expertise" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, Toronto, Canada and Virtually.

2021, “The Dashboard Approach to Environmental Governance: Situating Microsoft’s ‘Planetary Computer’ within the Environmental History of Computing.” Paper presented at the Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) of the Society for the History of Technology. Virtual.

Previous Degrees:

B.A., Anthropology and Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago;

M.A., Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago;

M.A., Sociocultural Anthropology, Columbia University