The ongoing, ever-evolving digital revolution presents us with a massive opportunity to infuse the disciplines of the College with the science and insights of data analytics. From scientific and mathematical discoveries through computation and pattern recognition, to the visualization and analysis of demographic and linguistic data, and the analysis of texts and images, the continuing expansion of digital data and our ability to store, retrieve, and analyze it is bringing about an epistemological revolution. We are producing knowledge in new ways – empirical investigation has taken the place of theoretical speculation in areas as diverse as systems biology and the micro-foundations of macroeconomic phenomena.
The disciplines of the arts and sciences are ideally positioned to catalyze this revolution in how we collect, apply, understand, and interpret information to improve human wellbeing and advance new discoveries. Consider first the mathematical and computational sciences, where the development of logic, stochastic models, algorithms, and number theoretical foundations of computation are central topics. For example, Sharon Goldberg, of the Department of Computer Science, studies the way computer networks worldwide connect to one another and analyzes their vulnerabilities. She uses tools from game theory, cryptography, and algorithms to understand the regulatory hurdles that computer scientists face when deploying new network security technologies. In addition to making discoveries in the foundations of computation, data and computer scientists often look to questions from other knowledge domains to make significant advances in their own.
Rapidly advancing instrumentation and experimental methods in the natural sciences produce huge amounts of data that motivate new analytical techniques necessary to translate data into new discoveries. From bioinformatics to genomics and proteomics, data science is advancing our understanding of organisms as complex, integrated systems. Biologist Tim Gardner studies neural pathways that enable birds to learn their songs using novel carbon fiber electrodes that generate millions of data points from individual neurons during months-long recordings of freely behaving birds. Many of our natural scientists create ways of generating new digital data through the invention of new instruments, such astronomer John Clarke’s rocket-fired spectrograph for studying the upper atmosphere of Venus, or the high throughput screening enabled by the Department of Chemistry’s Center for Molecular Discovery.
Digital data is being generated throughout the social world and our growing “internet of things” providing social and behavioral scientists new opportunities to use data science methods in forging novel insights into the origins, history, and behavior of humans and social groups. Mark Rysman of the Department of Economics constructs large data sets from sales transactions and consumer surveys to study the “network” effects of increasing availability of one good on the sales of complementary goods, such as DVD titles on DVD players, a problem made very hard by the volume of data and the ambiguous direction of the causal arrow. Jessica Simes uses digital mapping to visualize the incarceration rates in different parts of cities, making visible the correlations between incarceration and racial segregation. Digital data driven advances allow social scientists to ask and answer questions in new ways.
In the digital humanities, we are bringing a computational lens to bear in humanities inquiry, firmly grounded in humanities discipline and scholarship, to make new connections among ideas, texts, and material artifacts. Art historian Jodi Cranston is an example of a humanist who is deeply involved in computational approaches. Through collaboration with data scientists at the Hariri Institute of Computing and Computational Science and Engineering, she has developed Mapping Titian, a project that demonstrates the provenance of Titian’s paintings throughout the world, allowing her to “help people visualize one of the most fundamental concerns of art history: the interrelationship between an artwork and its changing historical context.” In addition to enabling broad access to textual and material archives, digital approaches can help see patterns in these traditional forms of data that have long been invisible.
Both the humanities and social sciences provide critical lenses for understanding and evaluating how data science is changing our lives and communities, as well. The ubiquity of electronic devices that record and transmit data about our behavior and our physical location and status poses serious dangers to our sense of privacy and our ability to be forgotten and left alone. Our sense of humanity, of our moral place and spiritual uniqueness in the universe is being rocked by the invention of ever more useful robots, artificial intelligence, and the ability to see farther back in time and out into space. The disciplines of the humanities are critically needed to help us make sense of our place in this digital and digitized world, evaluate its prospects, and avoid catastrophic error and misfortune. In the coming year a cross-college, interdisciplinary seminar, led by philosophers Juliet Floyd and Russell Powell and COM emerging media professor James Katz, will bring together faculty from around the university and beyond to discuss the philosophical, ethical, and epistemological issues in emerging computational technologies. (An announcement of this seminar is coming soon.)
Responding to these opportunities and challenges presented by the digital revolution and growing student interest in all things digital, CAS is building a critical mass of innovative computer and data scientists, and developing the computational thinking skills of faculty in disciplines across the College. For example, CAS is partnering with the BU Center for the Humanities and the Hariri Institute to fund a faculty development seminar in the digital humanities, led by archeologist Andrea Berlin, whose Levantine Ceramics Project is a groundbreaking model. In those disciplines that study data science directly, statistics and computer science, we are increasing the numbers of faculty. We are also hiring faculty in disciplines such as economics, political science, and sociology, as well as astronomy, chemistry, biology, and physics, who take advantage of computational approaches and algorithms to discover patterns in data that reveal knowledge of the social and natural world.
My vision is thus to infuse the arts and sciences with the capabilities enabled by computational tools and ideas in order to create knowledge on the leading edge of discovery. We will seek to ensure that our faculty and students have access to the tools they need to participate in and reinvent this revolution. I am eager to hear from you and to learn more about what faculty and students are doing and how our support can leverage their efforts and promote their work to a broad and curious public.
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This is the first of several dean’s notes in which I will discuss five key priorities that will define the future of the Arts & Sciences at BU. These priorities inform our strategy for growth and development of faculty, degree programs, research collaborations, and fundraising. They recognize existing faculty strengths and respond to global challenges and opportunities, as well as student interest. Taken together, these priorities offer opportunities for faculty and departments to build on collective strengths in ways that best fit their disciplinary assets, but encourage interdisciplinary discovery. These priorities are:
- Embracing the evolving powers of data analytics and infusing the disciplines of the college—from the humanities to the natural sciences—with the opportunities presented by data science.
- Renewing our support for the humanities as a crucial component of a liberal education and critical perspective on our technological age.
- Accelerating our strong neuroscience programs so that we can map the brain to better understand the neural bases of behavior and disease.
- Enabling BU to play an important part in humankind’s efforts to understand, mitigate, and adjust to climate change and create sustainable ways of life.
- Understanding the roots of inequality and the requirements of justice, and embracing our special role as educators in creating social mobility by increasing accessibility of a BU education for talented students regardless of family income.