Iyad Rahwan (), is a Syrian-Australian

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

. He is the director of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Between 2015 and 2020, he was an associate professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

. Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

and

social science Social science (often rendered in the plural as the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the ...

s, where he has investigated topics in computational social science, collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Biography

Rahwan was born in

Aleppo Aleppo is a city in Syria, which serves as the capital of the Aleppo Governorate, the most populous Governorates of Syria, governorate of Syria. With an estimated population of 2,098,000 residents it is Syria's largest city by urban area, and ...

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

. He earned an Information Systems PhD in 2005 from the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

. As an assistant and then associate professor in Computing and Information Science at MIT-partnered Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Rahwan investigated scalable social mobilization's possibilities, limits, and challenges in various contexts by analyzing data from the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, the DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011, and the 2012 US State Department Tag Challenge. In 2015, Rahwan started the Scalable Cooperation Group at the

, where he is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, as well as an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society. Since 2019 Rahwan is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

, where he founded and directs the Center for Humans and Machines.

Machine Behavior

Together with Manuel Cebrian and Nick Obradovich, Rahwan spearheaded an effort to establish the field of Machine Behavior. This field is concerned with the scientific study of

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

systems, not as engineering artifacts, but as a class of actors with particular behavioral patterns and ecology. This field overlaps with, but is distinct from,

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and

robotics Robotics is the interdisciplinary study and practice of the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Within mechanical engineering, robotics is the design and construction of the physical structures of robots, while in computer s ...

. It treats machine behaviour empirically, in the same way that

ethology Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behavior, behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithology, ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th cen ...

and

behavioral ecology Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for ethology, animal behavior due to ecology, ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined Tinbergen's f ...

study animal behavior without a full understanding of the bio-chemical mechanisms. The contours and fundamental research questions in the field of Machine Behavior were outlined by Rahwan, Obradovich and Cebrian, together with twenty co-authors from across the computational and behavioral sciences, in an article in the journal Nature.

Morality and Machines

Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles

Rahwan is one of the first to consider the problem of self autonomous vehicles as an ethical dilemma. His 2016 paper, ''The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles'', showed that people approved of

utilitarian In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that lead to the ...

autonomous vehicles, and wanted others to purchase these vehicles, but they themselves would prefer to ride in an autonomous vehicle that protected its passenger at all costs, and would not use self-driving vehicles if utilitarianism was imposed on them by law. Thus the paper concludes the regulation of utilitarian algorithms could paradoxically increase casualties by driving by inadvertently postponing the adoption of a safer technology. The paper spurred much coverage about the role of ethics in the creation of artificially intelligent driving systems.

Moral Machine

Moral Machine is an online platform that generates ethical dilemma scenarios faced by hypothetical autonomous machines, allowing visitors to assess the scenarios and vote on the most morally acceptable between two unavoidable harm outcomes. The presented scenarios are often variations of the

trolley problem The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics, psychology, and artificial intelligence involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. The series usually begins with a Scenario ...

. As of December 2017, the platform has collected 40 million decisions from millions of visitors from 233 countries and territories. Analysis of the data showed broad differences in relative preferences among different countries, and correlations between these preferences and various national metrics.

Cooperating with Machines

Together with Jacob Crandall and others, Rahwan studied human-machine cooperation by exploring how state-of-the-art

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an interdisciplinary area of machine learning and optimal control concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learnin ...

algorithms perform when playing repeated games against humans. The authors showed that providing a medium of communication can result in an algorithm learning to cooperate with its human partner faster and more effectively than a human in these strategic games.

AI and the Future of Work

Together with his student Morgan Frank and collaborators, Rahwan explored the relationship between city size and the potential impact of

and

automation Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...

on employment. They used a variety of estimates of the risk of automation of different jobs. Their main finding is that smaller cities may experience greater impact due to automation. Related work explores the polarization of the US labor market, due to the underlying polarized structure of workplace skills.

Other projects

The Tag Challenge

Rahwan led the winning team in the 2012 US State Department Tag Challenge, using crowdsourcing and a referral-incentivizing reward mechanism (similar to the one used in the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge) to locate individuals in European and American cities within 12 hours each, given only their photographic portraits.

The Nightmare Machine

The Nightmare Machine, developed under Rahwan's guidance, creates computer generated imagery powered by deep learning algorithms to learn from human feedback and generate a visual approximation of what humans might find "scary".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rahwan, Iyad 1978 births Living people People from Aleppo People from Melbourne Australian people of Syrian descent Australian computer scientists Syrian computer scientists MIT Media Lab people Australian expatriates in the United States Max Planck Institute directors University of Melbourne alumni