Beth Simone Noveck
Professor,
School of Law
Professor,
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Professor,
College of Arts, Media and Design
Professor,
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Director,
The Burnes Center for Social Change
Office
- 110 CH
Research Focus
Industrial and software engineering; solving public problems
About
Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University with appointments in law, engineering, policy, communications and computer science. She directs The Governance Lab and the Burnes Center for Social Change. Her work focuses on institutional innovation and the responsible design and use of collective intelligence and artificial intelligence to strengthen democratic institutions.
Noveck previously served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House under President Barack Obama, where she led the Open Government Initiative. In that role, she helped design policies and platforms—including data.gov and challenge.gov—that increased transparency, participation, and collaboration in government.
She has since served as a senior advisor on open government and digital transformation to leaders in the United States and internationally, including work with the 10 Downing Street and German Chancellor Merkel’s Digital Council. In New Jersey, she served as founding Chief Innovation Officer and later as the state’s first Chief AI Strategist, where she led efforts to apply emerging technologies to improve service delivery and public problem-solving.
Noveck founded InnovateUS, philanthropically-funded, evidence-based learning for public professionals by public professionals. InnovateUS delivers at-your-own-pace courses and live workshops for learners in 80 countries and across the United States. InnovateUS also studies the impact of upskilling on public sector workers through its Observatory of Public Sector AI. Currently, Beth is working with global experts in 24 countries to design a new course on AI and public engagement and leading a workshop series on Building and Buying Public AI.
She also launched AI for Impact, where Fellows build open source AI products with government partners. AI for Impact builds products that strengthen democratic institutions while creating public interest technology jobs for the next generation of problem solver.
Earlier in her career, Noveck created one of the first platforms for online deliberation known as Unchat and Peer-to-Patent, which connected experts with policymakers to improve public decision-making.
She is the author of multiple books on governance and innovation, including Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy (Yale University Press, 2026), Solving Public Problems (Yale University Press, 2021), which was named a Best Book of the Year by Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Smart Citizens, Smarter State (Harvard University Press, 2016).
You can read more by Beth at rebootdemocracy.ai.
Education
- JD, Yale Law School, 1997
- PhD, Political Science, Universität Innsbruck, 1994
Research Overview
Industrial and software engineering; solving public problems
My research focuses on institutional innovation and on the impact of technology on public institutions. As an interdisciplinary scholar tenured in law and engineering with long-standing experience in public administration, I work at the intersection of several fields to address how can governments, especially cities, take advantage of law, policy, data and technology to accelerate solutions to social problems, advance social justice and deepen democracy. I also focus on the science of public problem solving and teaching engineers to implement and scale their innovations with and for communities.
Research Centers and Institutes
Selected Publications
- Steve Balla, Reeve Bull, Bridget Dooling, Emily Hammond, Michael Herz, Michael Livermore, and Beth Simone Noveck, “Mass, Computer-Generated, and Fraudulent Comments,” Report for the Administrative Conference of the United States, July 2021
- Victòria Alsina Burgués, Eduardo González de Molina and Beth Simone Noveck, Mapeando oportunidades colaborativas para Madrid: Inteligencia colectiva para instituciones del siglo XXI, The GovLab, January 2021.
- Beth Simone Noveck, “Innovationsfähigkeit als Schlüsselkompetenz für die öffentliche Verwaltung,” in Brief aus der Zukunft, Statistisches Bundesamt, Feb 1, 2021.
Aug 18, 2021
New Faculty Spotlight: Beth Noveck
Beth Noveck joins the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department in July 2021 as a Professor, with joint appointments in the School of Law, the College of Arts, Media and Design, and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.