Studies that exceed the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines and the boundaries between the academic environment, industry and government are more and more widespread and sometimes led to the spawn of significant new disciplines. But Munther Dahleh, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science in myth, says that such a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work often suffers from a number of shortcomings and impairments compared to traditionally concentrated disciplinary work.
But more and more often, he says, the deep challenges that are facing us in the modern world – including climate change, loss of biological diversity, the way of controlling and regulating artificial intelligence systems, as well as the identification and control of pandemic – require such a message of specialist knowledge from very different areas, including engineering, politics, economics and data analysis. This implementation is what led him ten years ago, in creating a pioneering Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDS), aimed at supporting a deeply integrated and lasting set of cooperation than ordinary temporary and ad hoc associations that occur in the case of such work.
Dahleh has now written a book describing the landscape analysis process of existing disciplinary divisions in myth and imagining a way to create a structure to break down some of these barriers in a lasting and significant way to introduce this new institute. Book “Data, systems and society: the use of artificial intelligence for the social good“He was published in March by the Cambridge University Press.
The book, says Dahleh whether his attempt to describe our thinking that led us to the vision of the Institute. What was the vision for her? “He says he is addressed to many different recipients, but in particular:” I aim at students who come to research that they want to solve social challenges of various types, but using artificial intelligence and data learning. How should they think about these problems? “
The key concept that managed the institute's structure is something that he calls the “triangle”. This applies to the interaction of three components: physical systems, people interacting with these physical systems, and then regulation and policy regarding these systems. Each of these influences and has different in different ways, he explains. “You get a complex interaction between these three components, and then there is data about all these elements. The data is like a circle that is in the middle of this triangle and combines all these elements,” he says.
He suggests that when solving any large, complex problem, it is worth thinking in terms of this triangle. “If you solve a social problem, it is very important to understand the impact of your solution on society, people and the role of people in the success of your system,” he says. He often says: “solutions and technology actually marginalized some groups of people and ignored them. So a great message is always thinking about interaction between these components when you think about solving problems.”
As a specific example, he cites Covid-19 Pandemia. He says that this was a great example of a big social problem and illustrates three sides of the triangle: there is a biology that was initially not understood and was subject to intensive research efforts; There was an effect of infection, related to social behavior and interactions between people; There was a decision making by leaders and political institutions in the field of closing schools and companies or the requirements of masks and so on. “The complex problem we encountered was the interaction of all these components taking place in real time, when the data was not available,” he says.
Decision making, for example closing schools or companies, based on controlling the spread of the disease, had an immediate impact on social economy and prosperity as well as health and education, “so we had to consider all these things back into the formula,” he says. “The triangle came to us during a pandemic.” As a result, IDSS “became a place of convening, partly due to all the different aspects of the problem we were interested in.”
He says examples of such interactions. Social media and e-commerce platforms are another case of “systems built for people and have an aspect of regulation and match the same history if you try to understand disinformation or monitoring of disinformation.”
The book presents many examples of ethical problems in artificial intelligence, emphasizing that you should deal with this with great caution. As an example, he quotes self -propelled cars in which programming decisions in dangerous situations may seem ethical, but lead to negative economic and humanitarian results. For example, while most Americans support the idea that the car should sacrifice their driver and not kill an innocent person, they would not buy such a car. This reluctance reduces acceptance indicators and ultimately increases the victims.
In the book, he explains the difference as he sees her, between the concept of “transdisciplinary” and typical inter -disciplinary or interdisciplinary studies. “Everyone has different roles and have been successful in different ways,” he says. The key is that most such efforts are usually temporary, which may limit their social impact. The fact is that even if people from various departments work together on projects, they lack the structure of common magazines, conferences, common spaces and infrastructure and a sense of community. The creation of an academic unit in the form of IDS, which clearly crosses these limits in a established and lasting way, was an attempt to solve this lack. “It was primarily about creating culture so that people could think about all these elements at the same time.”
He hurries to add that of course such interactions already took place in the myth: “But we did not have one place where all students cooperate with all these rules at the same time.” For example, in the IDSS doctoral program there are 12 required basic courses – half of them from the theory of statistics and optimization, as well as half of social and humanities.
Dahleh gave way from IDSS management two years ago to return to teaching and continue his research. But when he thought about the work of this institute and his role in introducing him to being, he realized that, unlike his own academic research, in which each step is carefully documented in published articles: “I did not leave the trail” to document the creation of an institute and thinking behind it. “Nobody knows what we thought about, how we thought about it, how we built it.” Now, thanks to this book, yes.
The book, he says, is “in a sense leading people to how it all combined, in retrospect. I want people to read it and understand from a historical perspective how such a thing happened, and I tried to make it as understandable and simple as I could.”
