seminar series Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Emily Pontecorvo / December 5th 2018 / KSJ News & Events

Saving Lives With AI: Rosalind Picard on the Power of Affective Computing

The Media Lab professor spoke with KSJ fellows about building wearable devices that can detect seizures and tell us when we’re sliding into depression.

For some, the words “artificial intelligence” conjure up a vision of a future where robots have taken all of our jobs. For others, it brings to mind emotional machines — robots programmed to demonstrate a semblance of humanity. Behind that first image lies the idea that computers can do things much better and faster than we can. Behind the second lies something less tangible — perhaps a desire to understand how we work, what makes us human.

Rosalind Picard, the founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the MIT Media Lab, works in an area of AI that takes advantage of both of these features. Her projects utilize AI’s unique ability to gather lots of data and identify patterns, and apply it to read the often-indecipherable web of signals that our bodies and minds relay.

Picard recently spoke to KSJ fellows and guests about two such projects that she says have the potential to save lives.

The first project grew out of her group’s work building sensors that measure skin conductance, subtle electrical changes across the surface of the skin. Wired to a wristband, a sensor can produce a 24/7 feed of the wearer’s sympathetic nervous system activity.

Picard stumbled upon a discovery when someone wearing the bands had a seizure, and the measure of their skin conductance jumped through the roof. The peaks on the graph were higher than any Picard had seen before. She worked with the chief of neurosurgery at Children’s Hospital in Boston to investigate whether there was a connection between this huge sympathetic nervous system response and the seizure. In their study, 100 percent of Grand Mal seizures, the kind that cause a loss of consciousness and convulsions, showed the same massive peaks. Based on that research and subsequent studies, Picard developed a product called Embrace, a watch that automatically notifies a designated third party if the wearer is showing signs of a seizure. This kind of intervention could potentially prevent cases of Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy, or SUDEP.

KSJ fellow Elana Gordon, who reports on addiction, asked Picard whether anyone has thought about using sensor technology to prevent drug overdoses. Picard said that her group has measured responses in cocaine users, and found patterns in their skin conductance and the temperature of the skin. She noted that factors unrelated to cocaine use can cause similar responses, but with machine learning, if you can gather enough data, the signals start to separate from the noise. As the patterns become more defined, prediction will improve.

This is the idea behind the second project Picard discussed: using AI to prevent depression. Our phones, the little computers that we carry around in our pockets, can learn an awful lot about us. What if we could use that information to alert us to when we’re at risk of sliding into depression?

She ran a study with MIT students, and in addition to skin conductance, she tracked data like amount of sleep, light exposure, exercise, drinking, texting behavior, and she surveyed how they were feeling throughout the day. The goal was to create a deep neural network that would make predictions: Based on your data from today, are you likely to feel happy or sad tomorrow? Are you likely to feel stressed or calm?

One problem with all of this incredible pattern-recognition is that we might not always want to know the results. Do people want an app that tells them they are going to be sad tomorrow?

Picard wasn’t sure. But if algorithms learn which habits lead to dreary moods, an app could give recommendations that might change the outcome, like “call your friend today.”

AI might be able to help us understand our complicated, messy selves, but as of yet there’s no replacement for human empathy.

by Emily Makowski / November 14th 2018 / KSJ News & Events

MIT Postdoc Edmond Awad, on the Moral Dilemmas of Self-Driving Cars

Awad and his MIT colleagues gave millions of people the self-driving-car trolley problem. In a recent visit to KSJ, he talked about what he learned.

A self-driving car approaches a crosswalk and suddenly its brakes fail. It can avoid a person who’s crossing legally by swerving into the opposite lane, but then it will hit two people who are jaywalking. Anyone hit by the car will certainly die. What should it do?

This was just one of the moral dilemmas that Edmond Awad posed to KSJ fellows and guests at a seminar last week. Awad is one of the co-creators of the Moral Machine project, a website that asks these same questions of participants across the globe. It was developed by the Scalable Cooperation group, led by Iyad Rahwan at MIT’s Media Lab, where Awad has been a postdoc since 2015.

Launched in 2016, the Moral Machine presents website visitors with various versions of the so-called trolley problem. In some cases, the choice is between saving passengers or pedestrians. In others, participants must weigh personal characteristics: Should they save the male or the female? The old or the young? The person or the pet?

The Moral Machine has been translated into 10 languages. More than 4 million users from 233 countries and territories have made 40 million driving decisions on the site. In his seminar, Awad told the audience about the group’s findings, which were published in Nature last month.

The findings ranged from the unsurprising to the unsettling. In general, respondents preferred to spare as many lives as possible, to spare humans over pets, and to spare the lawful over the unlawful. But they also preferred to spare the young over the elderly and to save people of “higher status,” such as an executive, over people of “lower status,” such as a homeless person. Participants were more likely to save dogs than to save criminals — and were even less likely to save cats.

Based on a survey of the users, Awad and his colleagues were able to see how people of various ages and nationalities make decisions. They found differences, for instance, between regions of mostly individualist societies and those of mostly collectivist societies. “All countries preferred to spare younger [people] over older, but this difference was less pronounced in Eastern countries,” he said. He went on to add that “the stronger the rule of law is, the more likely countries are to spare the lawful.”

So why do all this? Awad said public opinions like those reflected in the Moral Machine project could influence how self-driving-car regulations are received in different societies. Algorithms that favor lawful pedestrians over jaywalkers might be more readily accepted in some countries than others, for instance.

But Awad doesn’t see the project as a roadmap for encoding morality into our cars. “We don’t believe [the users’ decisions] should be implemented,” he said. Instead, his team seeks to make people more aware of the moral dilemmas involved in programming self-driving cars. “We believe public engagement is a vital part of this issue,” he said.

by The Editors / August 22nd 2016 / Announcements

Welcome 2016-’17 Fellows!

The week was marked by tours, talks, and introductions — with many of the fellows meeting each other, as well as the KSJ staff, for the first time. And it all came together in style thanks to the diligence and hard work of KSJ’s new Program Administrator, Bettina Urcuioli.

Pictured above visiting MIT’s Media Lab last week are, from left to right: Lauren Whaley, Fabio Turone, Maura O’Connor, Rosalia Omungo, Robert McClure, Meera Submaranian, Bianca Toness, Chloe Hecketsweiler, Mark Wolverton, and Ivan Carrillo. You can read more about all of this year’s fellows here.

Getting to know you: KSJ Fellows met with the KSJ staff last week. — Getting to know you: KSJ Fellows met with
KSJ staff last week.

This week, fellows will enjoy one more indoctrinating event — a day trip to Cape Cod — after which they will begin the exciting (and sometimes daunting) task of selecting which courses to audit during the fall semester. They will also be learning more about KSJ’s signature seminars, a twice-weekly series of discussions with some of the greatest minds in science and science journalism. Program Director Deborah Blum has filled this semester with an impressive roster of speakers, including Alice Dreger, science historian, bioethicist, and author of the book Galileo’s Middle Finger; Calestous Juma, Director of Science, Technology and Globalization Program at Harvard’s Belfer Center for International Affairs; and MIT’s own Noam Chomsky.

Many — though not all — of the KSJ seminars provide a limited number of seats available to interested members of the public. If you would like to attend a specific lecture, please send an email Bettina Urcuioli with your name and affiliation to request a reservation.