From getting customized news headlines on our phone or individualized learning content in online courses, to using ride sharing apps for getting to work or guiding blind people as they run marathons, intelligent technologies (derived from data sciences, machine learning, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and other advances) are transforming our daily lives. Recognizing this continued expansion of technology and computational thinking in our classrooms and workplaces, the George Washington University has dynamic cross-disciplinary Human-Technology Collaboration (HTC) Lab. Drawing upon faculty and experts from education, data science, engineering, psychology, business, public health, and medical informatics, the Lab (and the associated PhD program) takes an interdisciplinary approach to education and research into how the collaborations of people and machines shape the future.
Being prepared to create, train, interact, and collaborate with intelligent technologies is an immediate challenge in the preparation of the global workforce. All of us must develop new skills and effective strategies to ask the right questions, interpret data analytics, apply data to improving performance, assess machine uncertainty, make ethical and policy judgments that integrate both data and social values, and find new collaborative ways that engage technologies as our partners in learning and work.
Preparing for data intensive environments powered by intelligent technologies requires research-based approaches. The HTC Lab creates an collaborative environment for researchers, from within and outside of George Washington University, to build the research foundations.