In This Edition

History and Culture

Part 1: Tools of History

Part 2: Cultural Lenses

Part 3: MIT's Historic Path

Questions & Answers

Professor John Dower Pulitzer Prize winning author who reexamines modern Japanese and US-Asian history.

Professor Philip S. Khoury Award winning political and social historian of the Middle East.

Arian Shahdadi '02 Won the History Prize for his essay "The Continued Violence of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863".

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Arian Shahdadi '02

Arian Shahdadi

Arian Shahdadi, a master's student in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, won the History Prize for the best essay written last year for his essay The Continued Violence of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863.

What intrigues you about history?

My parents are both political science PhDs from MIT and they instilled a love of history and politics in me from a young age. I would often attend my father's lectures and found history to be an integral part of how humans make decisions in the present. I found history engrossing, not only for the things that we can gain from it, but also because the stories are just amazing. Reading about the conquests of Alexander the Great and the adventures of explorers like Marco Polo were great motivators for my love of history as a child and this love carried over to the present.

Are there aspects of history that inform your work in AI?

History is very important in artificial intelligence. Seeing how human society has developed and understanding how decisions have been made informs us about human intelligence. For my master's thesis I am working on a "blunder stopper," an application that will help decision-makers avoid errors in decision-making that would not have been clear otherwise. History is crucial to this work, since past decisions help me to identify where, when, and how things went wrong, so that I can find ways to prevent those mistakes in the future. Right now the domain that I am working with is military and political decisions, so I am studying a lot of military history to continue my work. It's a great deal of fun as well, and I am thankful to be working on such a great project.

What's the focus of your research in the Artificial Intelligence Lab?

My personal research focus is understanding human intelligence on a computational level, but there is a great deal of work to be done before we get to that point. I am also interested in machine learning and computer networks. Currently, my Master's thesis is concerned with analyzing decision rationales in military and political decisions. Although this seems like a departure from my ultimate goal, I believe that understanding the human decision-making process is critical to understanding human intelligence. I hope to elucidate some basic principles with my thesis work that can be applied to human intelligence research in the future. I also hope to build an application that will be useful in helping decision-makers prevent mistakes.

Professor John Dower "We live in a world of spin and euphemism and, increasingly, plain anti-intellectualism, where people seem to be losing whatever capacity they may once have had for sympathetic imagination." more...

Professor Philip S. Khoury "The study of history can inform the present and even offer some lessons for the future. History is often most helpful when it is viewed from a comparative perspective." more...

Arian Shahdadi '02 "Seeing how human society has developed and understanding how decisions have been made informs us about human intelligence. " more...