People + Machines = New Possibilities

A social scientist, a computer scientist and an information systems professor walk into a room. It might sound like a setup to a joke, but on a recent afternoon at Stevens Institute of Technology’s Babbio Center, the meeting of multidisciplinary professors and students was no laughing matter.

The Stevens School of Business hosted the first People+Machines Workshop, bringing together faculty and Ph.D. students from across the university, including information systems, human-computer interaction, computer science, science and technology studies, and the social sciences, for an afternoon dedicated to discussing how people and computing technologies work together.

“We're interested in the intersection of business, computing, humanities and social sciences,” Aron Lindberg, Associate Professor and Chair of the Information Systems & Analytics Area said. “We all met to discuss the research projects we're engaged in right now, and the different ways in which we can collaborate to bring these unique competencies and capabilities to bear upon problems that are important to business and society at large.”

The afternoon included a brief overview of the participating research areas, a series of five-minute “lightning round” talks from Ph.D. students about their current projects and an open discussion to identify opportunities for research collaborations and industry engagement.

One of those doctoral students was Nikitha Preetham, a computer science Ph.D. candidate specializing in human-computer interaction and advised by Associate Professor Jina Huh-Yoo. Nikitha presented her work on caregiver-provider engagement, partnering with a small business that provides mental health care services to caregivers of at-risk youth, including children with behavioral health challenges. Her goal is to develop strategies that keep caregivers engaged in those programs, improving outcomes for the caregivers and the children in their care.

With her research meeting at the intersection of computing, health care and human behavior, Nikitha said the workshop offered exactly the kind of perspective her field demands.

“We can definitely get more of a behavioral aspect on this research from someone who's an expert in psychology, as well as the business and financial aspect of it from someone in the business school,” she said. “These different perspectives can help shape how my research progresses, so that it touches on topics I may not have full experience in.”

That sentiment was echoed from the humanities side of campus by Sandeep Mertia, Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. A computer scientist turned anthropologist and historian of computing, who studies the historical and anthropological elements of media technologies, computing, urbanism and futures, Mertia noted that the way academic fields are organized rarely creates formal opportunities to collaborate, even when researchers share similar interests.

“As we have realized, there are so many common concerns across our fields,” Mertia said. “When you have those collaborations, the person is not just looking for one dimension or one component. They want to think about AI ethics, they want to think about AI user cultures, along with the business model or the technical design of it, and we have the expertise to integrate those components.”

Lindberg hopes the workshop becomes a launching pad for joint research projects and grant applications, a curriculum that examines technology alongside its use in society and organizations, and sustained engagement with industry, nonprofits and local government.

“I think it's important to make sure that science and research don’t happen in a vacuum, and that we're not just developing new technologies and new forms of knowledge without considering what their social implications are,” he said.

Academics have a reputation of being territorial, but Lindberg argued the silos matter far less than what can be built between them.

“People outside of Stevens don't care about our departments or our schools or how we're internally organized,” he said. “What our partners care about is that we have a rich set of competencies that we can combine in unique ways to understand some phenomenon, to create a new innovation or technology, and to really leverage those different perspectives in a creative way.”