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The “interdisciplinary approach” is something that has been praised for decades for its ability to break down and develop new integrated approaches to research.
For Münter Dahle, founding director of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), it has shown society that data science and statistics can transcend individual disciplines and create new holistic approaches to solving complex societal challenges. success.
“It was critical from the beginning that we recognized the fields of data science, statistics, artificial intelligence and, to some extent, computing as transdisciplinary,” says Daleh, who is the William A. Coolidge Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computers. Science. “We have made this point many times – these are areas that are involved in your field. He is not ours; This organization is here for everyone.”
On April 14-15, researchers from across MIT and beyond came together to celebrate the achievements and impact IDSS has made on research and education since its inception in 2015. Taking place of IDSS’s annual statistics and data science conference, SDSCon, the celebration also doubled. as a way to recognize Dahley for creating and executing the vision for IDSS as he prepares to step down as director this summer.
In addition to talks and panels on statistics and computing, smart systems, automation and artificial intelligence, conference participants discussed issues such as climate change, healthcare and misinformation. Nobel Laureate and IDSS Affiliate Professor Esther Duflo talked about large-scale immunization efforts, former MLK Visiting Professor Craig Watkins joined a panel on fairness and justice in AI, and IDSS Associate Director Alberto Abadi discussed synthetic controls for policy evaluation. Other policy questions were explored through lightning talks, including by students in IDSS’s Technology and Policy Program (TPP).
A place I call home
The list of IDSS achievements over the past eight years is long and growing. From creating a home for the 21stSt Statistics of the Century After other failed attempts at MIT, the creation of a new Ph.D., which trains a trilingual student who is an expert in data science and social science in a domain context, to play a key role in defining an effective process for Covid testing. In the early days of the pandemic, IDSS left its mark on MIT. IDSS recently launched an initiative using big data to help drive structural and normative change toward racial equity, and will continue to explore societal challenges through statistics, social science, science, and engineering.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve done and all the people who contributed to it. The leadership team has been phenomenal in their commitment and creativity,” says Daleh. “I always say it doesn’t take one person, it takes a village to do what we’ve done and I’m very proud of that.”
Before forming the institute, Dahleh and others at MIT came together to answer one key question: How would MIT prepare for the future of systems and data?
“Data science is a difficult field because in some ways it is everywhere and belongs to everyone, like statistics and artificial intelligence,” says Daleh: “The most important part of building an organization to support it was making sure it was an organization. everyone.” The answer the team came back with was to build an institute: a department that could cross all other departments and schools.
While Dahle and committee members were creating this plan for the future, events that would lead to early IDSS recruits, such as Caroline Uhler, were also beginning to join the team. Uhler, now an MIT professor of computer science and co-director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, was a panelist at the celebration discussing statistics and human health.
In 2015, Uhler was a faculty member at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology who sought to return to the US. “I looked for positions in all different types of statistics-related departments, including electrical engineering and computer science, which were the fields. Not related to my degree,” Uller says. “I was drawn to MIT by Manter’s vision for the creation of a modern type of statistics and a unique opportunity to be part of the shaping process that must go forward.”
The breadth of the Center for Statistics and Data Science has given it a unique and strong character, creating an attractive collaborative environment at MIT. “IDSS has been instrumental in giving people like me a home,” adds Uhler. “By building an institute of statistics housed in every school, instead of within a single department, he created a home for anyone interested in the field.”
filling the void
For Ali Jadbabai, former associate director of IDSS and another early IDSS recruit, being in the right place at the right time found him at the center of it all. An expert in control theory and a network scientist by training, Jadbabai first came to MIT while on layoff as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“My time at MIT coincided with early discussions about creating the IDSS, and because of my experience, I was asked to stay and help build it,” Jadbabai says. He is now head of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and spoke at the celebration about MIT’s new major in climate system science and engineering.
A critical early achievement of IDSS was the creation of a doctoral program in Social and Engineering Systems (SES), which aims to educate and foster success for a new type of doctoral student, Jadbabai says.
“We realized that we had an opportunity to train a new type of PhD student who knew information science and statistics in mathematics, in addition to understanding the area – infrastructure, climate, political polarization – in which the problems arise,” he says. . “This program provides training in statistics and data science, mathematics of information science, and a branch of social science relevant to their domain.”
“SES fills a gap,” Jadbabaye adds. “We wanted to bring quantitative reasoning to social science fields, especially as they interact with complex engineering systems.”
“My first year at MIT really broadened my horizons in terms of what was accessible and interesting,” says Manxi Wu, a member of the first cohort of SES students to begin the Master of Science in Transportation (MST) program. . “My advisor introduced me to some interesting topics at the intersection of game theory, economics, and engineering systems, and in my second year I realized that my interest was in social-scale systems, with transportation as my application area. When I think about how I can make an impact in the real world.”
Wu, now an assistant professor in Cornell’s School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, was a panelist at the celebration session on smart infrastructure systems. He says the beauty of the SES program lies in its ability to create common ground between groups of students and researchers who have different interests in applications but share a desire to sharpen their technical skills.
“Although we may be working on very different application areas, core methodologies such as mathematical tools for data science and probability optimization form a common language,” says Wu. “We can all speak the technical language, and our diverse interests give us even more to talk about.”
In addition to the PhD program, IDSS has helped deliver quality MIT programming around the world with its MicroMasters program in Statistics and Data Science (SDS), which recently celebrated the certification of more than 1,000 students. MicroMasters is just one offering in the newly launched IDSSx, a collection of online learning opportunities for learners of various abilities and interests.
“The branding impact of what MIT-IDSS is doing around the world has been huge,” says Daleh. “Additionally, we’ve created smaller online programs to continue learning about data science and machine learning, which I think is also important for public education.
Hopes for the future
Through all its achievements, the core mission of IDSS has never changed.
“The belief was to create an institute focused on how data science can be used to solve pressing problems in society,” says Daleh. “IDSS’s organizational structure as an MIT Institute has enabled it to promote data and systems as a transdisciplinary field that engages all domains in support of its mission. This opposite ownership structure will continue to strengthen IDSS’s presence at MIT and make it an essential entity within the Schwarzman College of Computing.
As Dahleh prepares to step down from his role and Professor Martin Wainwright prepares to fill his (very large) shoes as director, Dahleh’s colleagues say the real key to IDSS’s success all started with his passion and vision.
“Creating a new academic unit within MIT is practically impossible,” says Jadbabai. “It requires structural change, as well as someone who understands multiple areas well, who knows how to get people to work together, and who has a mission.”
“The most important thing is that it was inclusive,” he adds. “He didn’t try to create a gate around it and say these people are there and those people aren’t.” I don’t think that has ever happened with Munter at the helm.”
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