As a graduate student working on his master’s thesis on speech recognition at the MIT AI Lab (now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), Dan Huttenlocher worked closely with Professor Victor Zue. Known for pioneering the development of systems that allow a user to interact with computers using spoken language, Zue frequently traveled to Asia, where much of the early research in speech recognition took place during the 1980s. Huttenlocher occasionally he accompanied his professor on these trips, many of which involved interactions with members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program, as he recalls. “It was a great opportunity,” according to Huttenlocher, “and it was a big part of what sparked my interest in engaging with business and industry, as well as the academic side of research.”
Huttenlocher earned his Ph.D. in computer vision from the Institute and has since embarked on a career spanning academia, industry, and the philanthropic sector. In addition to cementing his status as an esteemed researcher in academia, he spent 12 years as a scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center before leaving to co-found a fintech company. He served on the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 2010 to 22 (including as president as of 2018) and serves on the boards of directors of Amazon.com and Corning, Inc. He also helped found Cornell Tech, the technology, business, law and design campus in New York City built by Cornell University. There, he was the school’s first dean and vice chancellor, leading its efforts to link industry and information technology to improve New York’s technology ecosystem.
Today, Huttenlocher serves as the inaugural dean at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. To highlight the importance of this moment and the need for an interdisciplinary computing center like the computing faculty, he refers to the frequently cited prediction such software would engulf and disrupt traditional industry structures. Huttenlocher believes that while this idea was correct, what we are experiencing now is something different, bigger, with vast implications for humanity. Computer science in general, not just software, but also hardware, algorithms, and machine learning, has evolved to the point where it is redefining our approach to problem solving in nearly every industry, discipline, and research area. . This, she suggests, is also redefining reality as we experience it.
With Huttenlocher’s leadership, the university is both an acknowledgment of, and a response to, a new era of computing. Explore ways to support, but also lead, the technological changes that are reshaping the world. A two-way, interdisciplinary approach is key to the agenda, according to Huttenlocher. “We want to take the cutting edge of computing results and infuse them with the other disciplines,” she says. “This means helping departments outside of computer science branch out into computer science, but we also want to help fields of computer science branch out into other disciplines.” To accomplish this, Huttenlocher and the university aim to forge strong ties and collaborations in education and research between computer science and a wide range of disciplines at MIT, across the five schools, departments, and programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
From an operations standpoint, the university is not yet three years old, but Huttenlocher has already overseen the launch of various programs and initiatives aimed at merging computing with other disciplines. MIT has committed to creating 50 new faculty positions for the university: 25 in computer science and artificial intelligence, and 25 co-positions rooted in other academic departments not primarily focused on computer science. So far, it has hired 25 new faculty with half a dozen in shared positions.
He also oversaw the development of Common Ground for Computing Education, a platform that unites experts from departments across the Institute to develop and teach new coursesand launch programs that merge computing with other disciplines. Its goal is to capitalize on the ubiquity of computing through a coordinated approach to computing education at the Institute. Current common topic offerings include “Interactive Data Visualization and Society,” “Solving Real-World Problems with Computational Imaging and Optimization: Physics to Algorithms,” and “Julia: Solving Real-World Problems with Computation.”
The Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), for its part, is a cross-cutting initiative that encourages the development and implementation of responsible technology by incorporating knowledge and methods from the humanities and social sciences. with an emphasis on social responsibility. “SERC brings together multiple viewpoints—social scientists and humanities, engineers, and computer scientists—because much of understanding the social and ethical challenges of computing is about combining expertise in these disciplines,” says Huttenlocher. The initiative is based on a clearly defined teaching, research, and engagement framework designed to assess the broad challenges and opportunities associated with computing, while fostering what are called “responsible habits of mind and action” in MIT students. that create and implement computer technologies. Demonstrating demand and impact, in 2021 more than 2,100 students enrolled in courses where SERC worked with teachers to incorporate social and ethical issues into the curriculum.
In his book, “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” (Little, Brown, 2021), co-authored with Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, Huttenlocher explores the ways in which artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the way we we see ourselves as human. humans, our role in society, how we perceive the world around us and the need for collaboration between disciplines to define the future. Reflecting on what he and his colleagues have been able to accomplish at the university in such a short time, Huttenlocher says he is impressed and proud of what so many at MIT have already contributed. But that the job is far from over: “I think we’re now getting to the point where we’re starting to have impacts in parts of MIT, but we’re working towards a broad impact, a fusion between computing and disciplines across the globe.” Institute. that is the aspiration of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing,” he says.
