Fusion of data, systems and society | MIT News

Research that spans traditional boundaries of academic disciplines and between academics, industry and government is becoming increasingly extensive, sometimes leading to the emergence of important new disciplines. But, Munther Dahleh, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said that such multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work often suffers from many shortcomings and obstacles compared to traditionally more concentrated discipline work.

But the growing number of challenges facing far-reaching challenges in the modern world, including climate change, biodiversity loss, how to control and regulate artificial intelligence systems and identify and control the pandemic, all require expertise from very different fields, including engineering, policy, economics and data analysis. Ten years ago, this recognition was guided by him to establish the creation of the MIT Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) aimed at promoting a deeper range of integration and lasting collaborations than the usual interim and interim associations that usually take place for such work.

Dahleh now writes a book detailing the process of MIT’s existing landscape of disciplinary action at MIT and has come up with a way to create a structure designed to break these barriers in a lasting and meaningful way to achieve this new institute. The book “Data, Systems and Society: The Social Benefits of Utilizing AI” published by Cambridge University Press in March this year.

Dahleh said the book was his attempt to “describe our thoughts, which brought us to the vision of the institute. What is the driving horizon behind it?” He said it aims to target many different audiences, but “I’m targeting students who are about to do research, who want to solve different types of social challenges, but leverage AI and data science. How should they think about these issues?”

What he calls a key concept is to guide the structure of the institute. This refers to the interaction of three components: physical systems, people who interact with these physical systems, and then regulate and policy on these systems. These, he explained, are affected in various ways and are affected by others. “You get complex interactions between these three components and then you have data on all of these parts. The data is like a circle that is in the middle of that triangle and connects all of these parts,” he said.

He suggests that it is useful to think about this triangle when solving any major, complex problems. “If you are solving a social problem, it is very important to understand the impact of solutions on society, people and people’s role in the success of the system,” he said. “Solutions and technologies have actually marginalized certain populations and ignored them. So when you think about how to solve a problem, the biggest message is always to consider the interaction between these components.”

As a specific example, he cites the 19009 pandemic. He said this is a perfect example of a big social problem and illustrates three aspects of the triangle: biology, which is almost ununderstood from the beginning, and is subject to intensive research; there are contagious effects, which are related to social behavior and interactions between people. Moreover, the decisions of political leaders and institutions are in the areas of closing schools and companies or requiring masks. “The complex problem we have is that the interaction of all these components is the interaction of all these components that happen in real time,” he said.

His decisions, such as closing schools or businesses, based on controlling the spread of disease, have a direct impact on economics and social well-being as well as health and education, “So we have to return all of these things to the formula,” he said. “The triangle was vivid for us during the pandemic.” As a result, IDSS “became a place to call, partly because of all the different aspects of the problem we are interested in.”

He said that examples of such interaction abound. Social media and e-commerce platforms are “systems built for people and have regulatory aspects, and they are all suitable for the same story if you want to know or monitor error messages.”

The book presents many examples of moral issues in artificial intelligence, emphasizing that they must be handled with great caution. He used self-driving cars as an example, programming decisions in dangerous situations may seem ethical but can lead to negative economic and humanitarian outcomes. For example, while most Americans support the idea that cars should sacrifice drivers rather than kill innocent people, they wouldn’t buy such cars. This reluctance reduces adoption rates and ultimately increases casualties.

In this book, he explains the difference between the concept of “interdisciplinary” and typical interdisciplinary or interdisciplinary research. “They all have different roles and have succeeded in different ways,” he said. The key is that most of these efforts are often short-lived, which can limit their social impact. The truth is that even if people from different departments work together on projects, they lack structures that share journals, conferences, shared spaces and infrastructure, and community awareness. Creating an academic entity in the form of an IDS, explicitly crossing these boundaries in a fixed and persistent way is a way to try to resolve these boundaries. “It’s mainly about creating a culture where people think about all of these components at the same time.”

He quickly added that of course, this interaction has already happened at MIT, “but none of us interacted with all these principles at the same time.” For example, in the IDSS PhD program, there are 12 required core courses – half of them from statistics, optimization theory and computing, while the social sciences and the humanities are half.

Dahleh resigned from IDSS two years ago to return to teaching and continue his research. But when he reflects on the institute’s work and its role in bringing it into survival, he realizes that unlike his own academic research, each step along the way carefully documented “I left no trace” in published papers to document the creation of the institute and the thoughts behind it. “No one knows what we think, how we think of it, how we build it.” Now, with this book, they did.

The book, he said, is “In hindsight, it’s a kind of person who brings people together. I want people to read the book and understand it from a historical perspective, how it happened, and I did everything I could to make it as understand and as simple as possible.”