Opinion or Voices

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Chancellor

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Mon, 05/20/2024 - 14:01

In an era where strong opinions dominate and people are increasingly unwilling to entertain alternative perspectives, Chancellor Domenico Grasso is going old school in his effort to rebuild the foundation for debating big issues.

Credit: Michigan Photography

Could you be friends with a robot?

lblouin — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 17:10:14 +0000

Could you be friends with a robot? lblouin Mon, 04/01/2024 - 13:10

For the past few years, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Samir Rawashdeh has been building robots for his 7-year-old daughter, Maia, and his 5-year-old son, Adam. One of his first creations was a modified Roomba, the popular autonomous floor-cleaning robot, which he equipped with a vision system and topped with a googly-eyed Lego head and multicolor mini pom poms for hair. The souped-up Roomba would primarily look for and follow the kids around and then stop at a safe distance when it caught up to them. Even though its programming was simple, it was a huge hit with the kids. Maia would squeal as the Roomba “chased” her around the room. She’d ask it to accompany her on play missions around the house. She also figured out pretty quickly that she could trick it by hiding in her play tent, outside the reach of the Roomba’s camera.

Rawashdeh's second robot had a little more polish. Using 3-D printing plans he got from a Facebook group devoted to such things, he built a full-size replica of D-O, a scrappy Star Wars robot with a ducklike, pivoting conical head mounted to a thick off-road wheel. He then used his electrical engineering expertise to make it move. While the Roomba was autonomous, Rawashdeh opted for remote controls for D-O, thinking it would give the robot a wider range of intentional movements. With a radio controller in hand, Rawashdeh could make D-O not only chase the kids but run away from them. It could move its head in all directions, including shaking up and down for yes or sideways for no. When the kids would hug it, D-O could give them a catlike head love tap right back. With Rawashdeh’s latest version, D-O can talk.

Rawashdeh's D-O in action.

Rawashdeh says he initially started making the robots as a fun pandemic engineering activity that he and the kids could do together. But as he watched the kids play, he became fascinated by how they were interacting with the machines, especially D-O. The kids figured out pretty quickly that their dad was the one actually animating D-O, but in many ways, they didn’t care: They still reacted to D-O as though he was a “free agent.” The kids would talk with D-O and ask him to do things with them. They would give him affection. “One time, when I took D-O into one of my classes, Maia texted me and said, ‘Tell D-O that me and Adam love him,’” Rawashdeh remembers. Even without his own agency, D-O had become “somebody” to them — at least enough to miss him when he wasn’t around.

Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh

So what’s going on here? Or as Rawashdeh frames the question: “When does a bunch of plastic and wires and batteries and motors become more than that?” It’s not a question he can claim a definitive answer to, nor likely can anyone. The modern discipline of human-robot interaction is still very new, and you’ll find a wide range of ideas about what ingredients are essential to humans having meaningful social interactions with machines. Rawashdeh’s own take is that there is still a lot of exploratory trial and error going on among the designers, engineers and philosophers who think about these things. Most robots intended for social human interactions seem to contain at least some suggestions of biological anatomy. For example, Miko, an AI-powered robot that's being marketed as a companion for kids and who can even teach them social behaviors, has a friendly face. The engineers behind Paro went with a full biomimicry approach when they built an interactive baby seal to serve as a therapeutic companion animal. But there are also examples that completely buck this trend. The engineers behind Yolo, for example, which is advertised as a “creativity boosting robot” for children, actually let kids design it. The result was something that looks like an artsy bedside table lamp. It has no face and no eyes. Other than the wiry plastic strands shooting out of the top of it, which sort of look like hair, it’s not very creaturelike.

In his own informal trials with his kids, Rawashdeh noticed a couple qualities that seemed to be important for them to connect with the robots. First, movement helps, and specifically, an ability to move in response to something the kids are doing. Both the Roomba and D-O can do this. In the Roomba’s case, its movement is fully autonomous. But interestingly, the kids seem to be more engaged by the dad-controlled D-O, who, with its nods, sounds and affectionate head bumps, has a much greater range of responses. Rawashdeh’s observation that the kids know he’s animating D-O yet don’t seem to care is actually supported by some recent research suggesting that children’s tendency to anthropomorphize robots can be a powerful bonding force — even when they know the robot is not an independent being with its own inner psychological life. Rawashdeh also comes down in the camp that thinks looks matter, but it doesn’t take much. Even D-O’s hint of ducklike anatomy is enough to give it something that can be interpreted as a face. Interestingly, Maia has more or less the same take on all this as her dad. When Rawashdeh asked her if she could ever be friends with a robot, she quickly answered in the affirmative, then clarified — as long as it could follow her and was “very cute.”

Surprisingly, one thing Rawashdeh thinks is probably not that essential to forming a bond is speech. For example, they’ve had an Alexa in their house for a long time, and the kids will occasionally ask it questions, but they don’t think of it as a “playmate.” He also points out that R2-D2 from Star Wars is beloved but does not speak, and we form very strong bonds with our pet animals, who at least don’t speak our language. He thinks this peculiarity of speech, or conversational written language, might also explain why, despite some initial fears, technologies like ChatGPT seemingly haven’t unleashed a plague of socially isolating human-chatbot friendships. “I think part of what is going on here is nobody cares what a machine thinks, which is a key part of what makes our human-to-human relationships meaningful,” Rawashdeh says. “I think this is even the case with social media, which sort of feels like a lonesome experience between humans and technology. But it’s really more of a human-to-human interaction that’s mediated by technology. Why do we post our vacation photos on Instagram? It’s to show off where we’ve been to other people. If you had a robot liking all your posts, that wouldn’t be satisfying.”

This line of inquiry also, of course, begs some important questions about whether such human-robot relationships are good for us. Could they, for example, further transform or replace the human-to-human social interactions that have already taken a beating from technologies like television, the internet and smartphones? And should we be worried, in particular, about kids forming bonds with machines? Research in this area is still very new, but it is producing some interesting findings. On the positive side, there’s work suggesting that children with autism may actually learn better from robots, due to their more predictable responses. Paro, the therapeutic robotic seal, was shown to produce many of the same effects of traditional therapy animals. At least for now, a headline-grabbing study showing that human society could be a risk should we choose to befriend robots doesn’t exist. Rawashdeh says his kids, at least, don’t seem to be overly attached to D-O. Playing with their “very cute” droid is not an everyday activity at their house. Maia and Adam still like to play outside.

For Rawashdeh, this experience building robots for his kids has, however, inspired him to do some more formal work in this area. For one of his next projects, he’s experimenting with building a therapeutic robot that would essentially be a good listener, with a goal of potentially addressing certain gaps in the availability of mental health services. Powered by a modified large language model, it could engage people who, say, were having a bad day, with supportive, helpful humanlike dialogue. For the body, he’s thinking something suggestive of an owl — an animal associated with wisdom. It likely wouldn’t move around the room, but he would give it the ability to move its head and large, empathetic eyes, so it could appropriately make and break eye contact and “wouldn’t just stare at you.” “I’m thinking about the shortage in mental health services and the current loneliness epidemic, and how there are many people out there who could benefit from a helpful companion,” he says. On the other hand, he wonders if technology can be a salve for social isolation, which, in many ways, has been caused by technology. “That’s something I guess we’re still figuring out,” he says. “I think we still lack the language for describing what is going on,” he says. “Like, with music or art, we have established traditions and genres. We know, more or less, the key ingredients that go into making a Cubist painting or a certain type of song. But what makes a robot that humans will actually connect with?” On the front, Rawashdeh thinks we may still be shooting in the dark.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 04/01/2024 - 17:06

CECS Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh creates interactive robots for his kids to play with. It’s taught him something about what it might take to make human-robot interactions meaningful.

Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Samir Rawashdeh builds robots for his kids, many inspired by Star Wars characters. Photo courtesy Samir Rawashdeh

Living, working and learning in Detroit

lblouin — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 21:18:40 +0000

Living, working and learning in Detroit lblouin Mon, 01/15/2024 - 16:18

��-Dearborn students who want to learn about different cultures in a city that’s played an important role on the world stage don’t have to look far. With its rich history and historically Mexican, Greek, Polish, Irish and Southwest Asian neighborhoods, to name a few, Detroit is a great place for an intercultural experience, says Director of Global Engagement Scott Riggs. And Dearborn Wolverines can participate in Semester in Detroit, a four-month program where students can live, work and learn in the city.

“Global engagement does not have to be international. It’s intercultural. It is having an experience where you learn from someone who has a perspective that’s different from yours. U-M’s Semester in Detroit is a way to do this close to home,” Riggs says.

The SiD program, which is run out of ��-Ann Arbor and hosts classes at the ��-Detroit Center, gives ��-Dearborn students the opportunity to take urban and regional studies-themed courses and a Detroit-based internship for credit. Students are encouraged to live downtown at an affordable rate, but it is not required. SiD courses can be counted towards ��-Dearborn graduation requirements, but students should talk with their academic adviser to discuss how it fits with their degree program. Internships — which are with nonprofit organizations — are matched based on student interests.

The benefits of such an experience are extensive, Riggs adds: “Global engagement can help us work through our difficult differences and move toward better understanding one another, which ultimately is what is needed if we ever hope to address the numerous challenging borderless issues facing the world today.”

The program also gives students a chance to learn more about Michigan’s largest city. “The Semester in Detroit program gives a first-hand experience of immersing yourself in Detroit, while getting to know the neighborhoods, the people and the city itself,” Riggs explains.

Recently, three recent ��-Dearborn SiD alums shared a little about their experience.

Leah Williams, finding a future in the city

Leah Williams chose ��-Dearborn because it has a welcoming feel, was close to her Redford home and has smaller class sizes. But as friendly as the campus is, Williams wasn’t sure what exactly she wanted to study or where she’d find her people.

Then, during her first year at ��-Dearborn, she applied to the SiD program after learning about it in an email from the Dean of Students — and everything changed. “At that time, I was nervous to break out of my comfort zone. It can be a little scary to jump into something new. But I know college is about new experiences and growth, so I told myself to try,” she says. “It changed my life and I can’t recommend it enough.”

Williams, who chose to live in a SiD-designated apartment in Detroit’s Midtown during the four-month program, says she learned how to live independently, saw up close some of the challenges and opportunities in Detroit, met new friends from ��-Ann Arbor and ��-Dearborn, and took advantage of downtown experiences like ice skating at Campus Martius.

��-Dearborn students Leah Williams (center, in the Michigan hoodie) and Jordan Jones (in the yellow shirt) get a tour of a Feedom Freedom Growers garden site with Mama Myrtle Curtis (third from right), one of the founders of FFG. Photo courtesy Leah Williams

Williams, who loves theater and acts in local productions, completed an internship at Matrix Theatre Company in Southwest Detroit, where she assisted with community performances and promotion. She says that experience showed her how things she enjoys can have a place, even when it’s not a direct part of a career path. “I love theater, but didn’t see how it would be a part of my professional future. The internship showed me how I can incorporate my passion for things like theater into my career,” she says. “You can use the skills or talents that you have in other areas no matter the field you choose.”

Williams — who liked how the classes included learning excursions around the city — also found an area of study she felt connected to: the urban and regional studies major. She took courses that examined environmental concerns in Detroit, the city’s history, educational inequities, food justice efforts and more. “I feel like I have a deeper connection to the city — a city my parents grew up in. I saw how I can channel my passion of helping others into Detroit neighborhoods,” she says. “My parents told me what a special place Detroit was and is. And now I can honestly say that I get it. I love Detroit and can see my future there.”

Jordan Jones, the advocate who returned to college

Jordan Jones has worked for nonprofits and supported antiracist movement work for years. She says social justice efforts are necessary because they look to solve complex problems, but she has also noticed that they can fall short when they don’t offer feasible solutions.

“Legislators and policymakers think and speak in concrete terms. We can’t say, ‘defund the police’ without a tangible solution as to what will replace the police. If advocacy work doesn’t get down to brass tacks, people who we need to help make the changes might not listen,” Jones says. “Solutions need to be digestible and realistic. I returned to college to learn more about how to best help communities where I’m needed.”

Jones, who is pursuing a degree in health and human services with a concentration in public health, chose ��-Dearborn because she saw that the university works extensively in Detroit communities. Having experienced hardships in her own life — she was raised by a single mother following the murder of her father — Jones wants to help people connect to needed resources. “There were people there for me when I needed it,” she says. “And I am not sure where I would be today without them. Now I want to be that support for someone in need.”

When she learned about the Semester in Detroit program, Jones saw an opportunity to get an applied education. She worked as an intern at the Detroit Justice Center, where she assisted with several projects, including a Family Law Handbook, which will be distributed throughout the Michigan prison system to inform incarcerated citizens about their custodial rights. Through her courses, Jones met with Detroit artists and activists. She also participated in field visits to sites like Feedom Freedom Growers community garden on Detroit’s east side, and the James and Grace Lee Boggs School, an elementary school focused on community empowerment that is named after two legendary social justice activists.

“Sometimes, when we’re trying to create change, we feel like we’re working in isolation and wonder if we’re making an impact. But programs like SiD show us how to do this work in practical ways, in community. It lets us know that there are others out there who are working to change the status quo — even when we don’t see it, to know that it’s happening all around us. That energizes me and gives me momentum to keep moving forward,” Jones says. “When I applied to ��-Dearborn, I knew it would change me in ways I couldn’t know. It has. And I can say the same about my Semester in Detroit experience.”

Ivett Facundo, the lifelong Detroiter

Ivett Facundo grew up in Detroit. But she didn’t learn about her city’s deep roots until she took courses through SiD.

“Growing up in Detroit, I wasn't able to walk around as a kid because of how the media portrayed the city as not safe. This made my parents very protective of us, and like many other kids in the community, we had transportation challenges, immigration scares and other obstacles that prevented me from getting to know the city,” Facundo says. “The Semester in Detroit program opened my eyes to the people and history of my city.”

A first-generation Mexican-American, Facundo lives in Southwest Detroit and is surrounded by families from Mexico and Central and South America, but she didn’t know the history behind her community. Facundo says she learned more about the culture and needs of the neighborhoods as an intern at Garage Cultural, an arts organization that produces a variety of events, public art installations and educational programs.

Ivett Facundo, far left, is one of several recent Semester in Detroit students who grew up in the city. Photo courtesy Ivett Facundo

In addition, Facundo says her courses brought in community historians, took her to sites around the city that examined the city’s Black and Latino/Latina history and exposed her to a variety of cultural histories. She was inspired to complete an independent research project where she focused on the Mexicantown neighborhood. She says she learned how labor migration from Texas and Mexico helped create the culturally rich community she lived in as a child — and she was pleased to see the first historic marker honoring Tejano musical contributions to Michigan go up in 2023. It’s on the northeast corner of Bagley and 21st streets.

“More and more historians are advocating to document how Southwest Detroit came to be, the challenges people faced and the outcomes. Hopefully I’ll be in the mix to help with that,” she says.

Facundo also says she learned more about why her friend’s family was forced to move from the Delray home they owned. “I knew she had to move away when we were in high school and they were upset about it, but I didn’t know why. I learned it was to make room for a bridge that would allow for more trucks to travel across to Canada, which would benefit industry — but not the neighborhood,” she says, while also noting the environmental and health concerns in the neighborhood caused by higher levels of air and sound pollution due to increased semi-truck transportation. “Many people were displaced from their homes, which is not right, but it was still allowed to happen.”

Facundo, who graduated in December, says the program did more than help her feel more connected to her city — it also helped her map her future. Facundo recently accepted a full-time position with Deloitte Global, where she will focus on diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives along with corporate responsibility efforts.

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The SiD program is currently accepting applications and substantial need-based financial aid is available. Apply here. Article by Sarah Tuxbury

Experiential Learning

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Mon, 01/15/2024 - 21:16

Through U-M’s Semester in Detroit program, students meet community leaders and immerse themselves in the city – while earning a stipend and college credit.

Students visit a gallery at Feedom Freedom Growers during the Fall 2023 Semester in Detroit. Photo courtesy Leah Williams

Lynn Perry Wooten visits ��-Dearborn for Thought Leaders Series

lblouin — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 15:42:25 +0000

Lynn Perry Wooten visits ��-Dearborn for Thought Leaders Series lblouin Mon, 04/03/2023 - 11:42

Lynn Perry Wooten has been studying the challenges women face in American workplaces for more than two decades. In that time, she’s seen a lot of change, but also many familiar themes. For example, Wooten argues the recent pandemic-prompted “she-cession,” where women, especially younger women and women of color, left the traditional workforce in historic numbers, represents both a new phenomenon and a crisis whose dynamics have been “smoldering” for years. “Even now, business is one of the top majors in the country and when you look at gender parity . . . and you look at entry levels in the corporate suite, 48% [are women], but by the time you get to the C-suite, we’re down to 24%. This is that ‘leaky pipeline.’ For management, we get to 41%. By VP, it’s 30%. So something is happening in addition to the she-cession in the corporate sector,” Wooten says.

Scholars who study the leaky pipeline — the phenomenon where gender (and racial) representation lag the higher you get in an organization’s hierarchy — have identified a huge range of contributing factors, including a childcare crisis and a suite of persistent systemic and structural challenges. But Wooten argues that there are also “best practices” that can guide women seeking leadership positions and organizations looking to cultivate women leaders. Those themes are the subject of her recently co-authored book “Arrive and Thrive: 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership.” During her Thought Leaders talk on the ��-Dearborn campus, Wooten discussed these practices, which bring together her and her colleagues’ research and advice from 24 women in top leadership positions.

Practice 1: Investing in your best self. Wooten argues you’ll put yourself in the best position to thrive if you have intimate knowledge of your strengths, values and what makes you joyful at work. Then, seek out or create workplace environments that allow these parts of your “best self” to thrive.

Practice 2: Embracing authenticity. In our workplaces, we often edit ourselves down to just the parts we think are work appropriate. Wooten says bringing your social identity, values and unique style to work is what makes you not like everybody else and can give you a “competitive advantage.”

Practice 3: Cultivating courage. Wooten says courage is rooted in introspection. It’s about knowing yourself, confronting your flaws, admitting you don’t know everything and using this to prepare for challenging situations. To do this, Wooten stresses that organizations need to cultivate supportive cultures that encourage innovative thinking and don't penalize people for taking productive risks.

Practice 4: Fostering resilience. Resilience fundamentally involves overcoming the fear, anxiety and selfishness that naturally accompany crisis situations. We can view moments of upheaval as opportunities to examine what skills we may need to develop to succeed in changing times.

Practice 5: Inspiring a bold vision. “Sadly … the research shows that women are not perceived as visionary. A man can say an idea in the room and we see it as brilliant. And when a woman says the same thing, it’s not seen as visionary. We wanted women to have tools to be visionary,” Wooten says. Among other things, this includes identifying what the world or organization needs, coming up with daring solutions and being able to communicate ideas in ways that resonate with people.

Practice 6: Creating a healthy team environment. Wooten says giving women opportunities to lead teams and projects early in their careers is crucial to fixing the leaky pipeline. Culture changes are important too. “Good teamwork is frequent and honest communication . . . it’s making time for the team to learn together, it’s appreciating the team, and it’s ensuring that when the team makes mistakes, the leader owns it, therefore it’s a psychologically safe culture.”

Practice 7: Committing to the work of the inclusive leader. Wooten argues doing the work of the inclusive leader starts with knowing your strengths, which leads to a knowledge of your biases. It’s also about embracing the value of equity and the idea that “everyone is not the same and everyone needs different things.” As a practical tool, she sees a lot of potential for “sponsoring” other people in the workplace. “In the African American community, there is a saying ‘lift as you climb.’ That is what sponsorship is about. It’s when someone else is not in the room, you’re elevating them. You’re looking to see, do we have fair representation across gender roles, and finally making that systems change.”

Missed the Thought Leader Series event and want to watch? Check out the recording.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Strategic Planning

Off

Mon, 04/03/2023 - 15:42

The Simmons University president and former Ross School of Business professor shared her insights on the “she-cession” and best practices for supporting women in leadership.

Photo courtesy Simmons University

We’re not ready for the electrification era

lblouin — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:39:56 +0000

We’re not ready for the electrification era lblouin Wed, 03/08/2023 - 11:39

Fast forward a decade and the way we power our cars or heat our homes may look a lot different than it does today. Rather than stopping at the gas station every week to fill up, you’ll plug your electric vehicle (EV) into a small port on the side of your house anytime it’s sitting in the driveway. Instead of a natural gas-powered furnace or boiler, you’ll have an electric mini-split heat pump or two, a technology that works like an air conditioner in the summer, but when thrown in reverse, can actually heat your home, even if you live in a cold climate. While you’re at it, you may also swap out your gas stove, water heater and clothes dryer and make your home fully electric. Needless to say, while your gas bill might shrink or go away altogether, your electricity bill will go up, though on the whole, you’ll likely be saving a substantial amount of money. On average, it’s about three times more expensive to fill up a gas car than to charge an EV. And heat pumps usually offer savings over gas or oil furnaces, especially when volatile gas prices spike.

Associate Professor Wencong Su

Countries across the world are banking on this “electrification” of our homes and businesses — and a greening of electricity generation — to slash climate-warming emissions. Here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act offers generous incentives and tax credits, which greatly reduce the cost of the new technologies, and in some cases, make them free for lower-income folks. (Check your eligibility with this calculator.) But if we quickly ramp up our electricity use, it begs the question, can the grid deliver? Wencong Su, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in power systems, says it’s a complicated issue, but in short, the answer is “no way, not even close.” That is, unless we start making some big changes, relatively quickly. For starters, there’s the question of quantity: As we replace cars and appliances that directly burn fossil fuels with ones powered by electricity, will there actually be enough electrons to go around? Su says if you want an EV now, you shouldn’t be concerned. But as high-consuming technologies like electric cars and heat pumps become widespread, we’ll need a plan for making more electricity. For example, California recently passed a law requiring 35% of new cars to be zero-emissions by 2026, and 100% by 2035. To power millions of new EVs and electrify other parts of the economy still relying on fossil fuels, the state estimates it will need to triple power generation and build solar and wind facilities three to five times faster than it is now.

Su says things get even more complicated when you factor in the strain this could put on the transmission and distribution system, the network of large and small lines that carry electricity to our homes, buildings and businesses. These lines are designed to carry specific loads, and if demand rises beyond the limit of what a particular part of the transmission or distribution system can handle, we’ll need more capacity. If you add an EV charger to your house, it’s no big deal. But if suddenly most of your neighbors do too, “you could reach a point where we’re pushing the limits of the local distribution infrastructure that supplies a neighborhood,” Su says. “What makes it even more complicated is that user behavior of EV charging is unknown. It’s a black box. Will people all charge their EVs at the same time? Will a user charge at the same time every day, or at 5 p.m. today and 3 p.m. tomorrow? This makes it very challenging to predict the load.” Indeed, California’s plan for handling a surge in EVs depends on scenarios that predict charging during mostly off-peak hours, which some argue may be an unrealistic assumption.

We can of course upgrade our transmission and distribution lines, but it’s going to cost us. The U.S. electric grid has about 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and more than 5 million miles of distribution lines. Currently, the cost to build transmission lines is between $1 million and $5 million per mile, with distribution lines coming in around $30,000 to $150,000. “No one wants to pay for it,” Su says. “That’s why you’re seeing utilities focus on demand response or time-of-day pricing, which use price incentives to try to encourage users to use electricity during off-peak hours so they can keep rates roughly where they are now. This buys the utilities some time before they have to make major investments. But we’re adding all these incentives for EVs and heat pumps and basically skipping the infrastructure part.” The big thing that’s saving us for the time being, Su says, is the low market penetration of these new technologies, although this could be changing quickly. Last year, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces for the first time in the U.S., even without the benefit of the Inflation Reduction Act incentives, which started kicking in in January.

We’re adding all these incentives for EVs and heat pumps and basically skipping the infrastructure part.

There appears to be no getting around that fact that we’ll eventually have to build more power plants and make expensive upgrades to the grid. But Su notes these aren’t the only tools we have to keep the grid functioning as electricity demand rises. Su’s own research focuses on a variety of “smart grid” technologies, including DC microgrids, which could ease the related challenge of bringing more renewable energy onto the grid. He’s also optimistic that dynamic pricing schemes, which incentivize use during specific times, can help reduce demand during peak times and prevent brownouts. He also has his eye on new approaches, like “multi-life energy storage,” which envisions repurposing old EV batteries into a dispersed network of battery banks for backup and emergency use. Right now, he says the market penetration for EVs is so low that there isn’t much of a market yet for the used batteries, which are generally removed when they no longer hold three-quarters of their original charge. One side effect of having millions more EVs on the road is they’ll provide a steady supply of diminished, but still useful, batteries that can help shore up the grid.

Su thinks it will likely take a combination of all these approaches to prepare for the electrification era. We may also have to adjust some of our core expectations about electricity — namely that it’s cheap, it’s there whenever we need it, and it’s something we consume but don’t produce. As energy gets more expensive in an effort to preserve reliability, Su worries not just about a balance between supply and demand, but a gap between haves and have nots. He says neighborhoods with people able to afford new technologies like EVs and heat pumps are most likely to get the upgraded grid infrastructure. They also have the ability to put solar panels on their roofs and sell electricity, not just buy it. "We really need to pay attention to how this transition will impact underserved communities,” Su says. “People without extra income are already very sensitive to price, and they may not have the luxury of investing in technologies like solar panels or battery backup systems, which help them ride out a power outage or actually become energy producers.”

In short, Su says, the next iteration of our electric grid will only be a success if it’s both reliable and fair.

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Technology

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Wed, 03/08/2023 - 16:38

To slash emissions and battle climate change, countries across the world are pushing the adoption of electricity-based technologies like electric vehicles and heat pumps. But Associate Professor Wencong Su says the grid is nowhere near ready for a lot more of us to be using so much more power.

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Images by Marianna, stockphoto-graf, moodboard, and phonlamaiphoto via Adobe Stock

AI's mysterious ‘black box’ problem, explained

lblouin — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:26:44 +0000

AI's mysterious ‘black box’ problem, explained lblouin Mon, 03/06/2023 - 12:26

Learning by example is one of the most powerful and mysterious forces driving intelligence, whether you’re talking about humans or machines. Think, for instance, of how children first learn to recognize letters of the alphabet or different animals. You simply have to show them enough examples of the letter B or a cat and before long, they can identify any instance of that letter or animal. The basic theory is that the brain is a trend-finding machine. When it’s exposed to examples, it can identify qualities essential to cat-ness or B-ness, and these ultimately coalesce into decision protocols that give us the ability to categorize new experiences automatically and unconsciously. Doing this is easy. Explaining how we do this is essentially impossible. “It’s one of those weird things that you know, but you don’t know how you know it or where you learned it,” says Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Samir Rawashdeh, who specializes in artificial intelligence. “It’s not that you forgot. It’s that you’ve lost track of which inputs taught you what and all you’re left with is the judgments.”

Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh

Rawashdeh says deep learning, one of the most ubiquitous modern forms of artificial intelligence, works much the same way, in no small part because it was inspired by this theory of human intelligence. In fact, deep learning algorithms are trained much the same way we teach children. You feed the system correct examples of something you want it to be able to recognize, and before long, its own trend-finding inclinations will have worked out a “neural network” for categorizing things it’s never experienced before. Pop in the keyword “cat” — or even the name of one of your favorite cats — into the search bar of your photo app and you’ll see how good deep learning systems are. But Rawashdeh says that, just like our human intelligence, we have no idea of how a deep learning system comes to its conclusions. It “lost track” of the inputs that informed its decision making a long time ago. Or, more accurately, it was never keeping track.

This inability for us to see how deep learning systems make their decisions is known as the “black box problem,” and it’s a big deal for a couple of different reasons. First, this quality makes it difficult to fix deep learning systems when they produce unwanted outcomes. If, for example, an autonomous vehicle strikes a pedestrian when we’d expect it to hit the brakes, the black box nature of the system means we can’t trace the system’s thought process and see why it made this decision. If this type of accident happened, and it turned out that the perception system missed the pedestrian, Rawashdeh says we’d assume it was because the system encountered something novel in the situation. We’d then try to diagnose what that could have been and expose the system to more of those situations so it would learn to perform better next time. “But the challenge is, can you get training data that covers everything?” Rawashdeh says. “What about when it’s sunny and a bit foggy, or they’ve just salted the roads and the asphalt now appears whiter than it usually does? There are an infinite number of permutations so you never know if the system is robust enough to handle every situation.”

Rawashdeh says this problem of robustness makes it difficult for us to trust deep learning systems when it comes to safety. But he notes the black box problem also has an ethical dimension. Deep learning systems are now regularly used to make judgements about humans in contexts ranging from medical treatments, to who should get approved for a loan, to which applicants should get a job interview. In each of these areas, it’s been demonstrated that AI systems can reflect unwanted biases from our human world. (If you want to know how AI systems can become racially biased, check out our previous story on that topic.) Needless to say, a deep learning system that can deny you a loan or screen you out of the first round of job interviews but can’t explain why, is one most people would have a hard time judging as “fair.”

So what can we do about this black box problem? Rawashdeh says there are essentially two different approaches. One is to pump the brakes on the use of deep learning in high-stakes applications. For example, the European Union is now creating a regulatory framework, which sorts potential applications into risk categories. This could prohibit the use of deep learning systems in areas where the potential for harm is high, like finance and criminal justice, while allowing their use in lower-stakes applications like chatbots, spam filters, search and video games. The second approach is to find a way to peer into the box. Rawashdeh says so-called “explainable AI” is still very much an emerging field, but computer scientists have some interesting ideas about how to make deep learning more transparent, and thus fixable and accountable. “There are different models for how to do this, but we essentially need a way to figure out which inputs are causing what,” he says. “It may involve classical data science methods that look for correlations. Or it may involve bigger neural nets, or neural nets with side tasks, so we can create data visualizations that would give you some insight into where the decision came from. Either way, it’s more work, and it’s very much an unsolved problem right now.”

At the end of the day, the question of what role AI should play in our lives may not be fundamentally different from the conversations we have anytime a potentially transformative technology emerges. Typically, that conversation involves a calculation of risks and benefits, and Rawashdeh thinks it’s still early enough for us to have thoughtful conversations about how and how quickly we want deep learning to shape our world. “Without question, there is a huge potential for AI, but it gets scary when you get into areas like autonomy or health care or national defense. You realize we have to get this right. For example, whenever I have a moment when I’m disconnected from the internet for a few days, I'm reminded just how different that reality is than the modern reality that’s shaped by social media or all the things we immerse ourselves in online. When the internet came into being, we just let it into our world, and in hindsight, we can see that came with certain risks. If we could turn back the clock 30 years, knowing what we know now, would we just let the internet loose on people? I think it’s a similar decision that we face now with AI.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Technology

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 03/06/2023 - 17:26

Artificial intelligence can do amazing things that humans can’t, but in many cases, we have no idea how AI systems make their decisions. ��-Dearborn Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh explains why that’s a big deal.

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Illustrations by Nadia and Simple Line via Adobe Stock

Dania Bazzi’s American Dream

lblouin — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:10:27 +0000

Dania Bazzi’s American Dream lblouin Wed, 02/08/2023 - 14:10

Dania Bazzi’s family story is a reminder that the narrative of the American dream, however problematic, isn’t without roots in reality. In the late 1970s, Bazzi’s parents immigrated from Senegal to metro Detroit, where Mary and Al started a convenience store business in Wayne, a working class community in the inner ring of western suburbs. It wasn’t an easy life, though it was unquestionably a good one. Her parents worked a permanent schedule of 12-hour days with no days off, and Bazzi says at least one of them was at the store until they both retired. But it was never boring, nor were they ever lonely. “My parents’ store was almost like a neighborhood meeting place,” Bazzi says. “People would come and talk about their problems or have a cup of coffee. They saw my mother and father as confidants and friends, and that won them a lot of loyalty in a community where running a business wasn’t always easy.” That social currency no doubt served her father well when he later decided to go into local politics, first as a Wayne City Council member and later as the city’s mayor and Wayne County Commissioner. Bazzi and her siblings enlisted as his campaign door knockers to support their dad’s dreams, the way he’d done for them.

Bazzi says Mary and Al were always clear about the reason for moving to the U.S. Ensuring they’d have access to free, quality education was a ticket to giving their kids a more comfortable life, and ideally, one where each of them could pursue careers that fit their passions. Studying hard and getting good grades were taken for granted in their home, and there was never any question about whether Bazzi or her four siblings would go to college. She says it was an easy choice to follow in her two older sisters’ footsteps and enroll at ��-Dearborn, where the smaller class sizes and down-to-earth professors and staff made a shy kid feel safe.

To say Bazzi was a dedicated student is an understatement. Taking advantage of a block-tuition program that allowed students to take up to 18 credits per semester for the price of 12, she earned her bachelor’s in mathematics in three years. During that time, she basically lived on campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., squeezing in study sessions between classes and surviving on Cottage Inn pizza at the U Mall, a forerunner of the University Center. During her final semester, she interviewed for and landed a job at Ford as a project management consultant, where she was tasked with wrangling white-collar engineers and blue-collar suppliers to make sure cars got built on time. “It’s funny to think about now, but there I was, a 21-year-old, on the phone, trying to get tough with suppliers, threatening that we’d find another supplier or that I’d be there on the due date to pick the parts up myself. And they’d be like, ‘Who is this?’”

Overall, it was a good job, with a good salary and health benefits, and Bazzi says she grew a lot, especially when it came to building professional relationships. But it wasn’t long before she started seriously considering a dream that had always been hanging out somewhere not quite in the back of her mind. She credited her public school teachers with giving her “belief in myself when I didn’t always have it” and had often felt inspired to follow in their footsteps. So while working full-time at Ford, Bazzi headed back to ��-Dearborn for a master’s program designed for working professionals like her who already had a bachelor’s in a teachable subject and wanted to make a pivot to education. Her memory of the program is that it was “robust.” When she hit her first in-classroom practicum, there was definitely part of her that wondered if she’d made the right choice. Even once she took her first job as a high school math teacher, the doubts didn’t disappear immediately. “I remember at the end of my first year, I was talking with my teaching partner who was next door, and I told her ‘I’m never coming back. I’m going back to Ford!’ I was semi-joking. Semi. But I was exhausted. And she literally put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Hey, go have a good summer, relax, but I’ll see you next door. After a week or two, you’ll be fine.’”

Her colleague was right. Every year, Bazzi says her confidence grew. She also got more excited about new methods for making math exciting for her students. Her classroom was noisy — in a good way — and she describes her style as a “warm demander,” a term she borrows from teacher educator Zaretta Hammond. Between bells, the expectations for participation were always high, but outside of class, students could come to her for anything. Those five years leading a classroom produced countless good memories. But Bazzi’s strong interest in pedagogy and curriculum innovation eventually led her to take an interview for a school improvement consultant in another district. When she got the formal offer, it was a hard decision to leave the classroom, but ultimately, she thought she’d have a broader impact helping teachers and districts develop exciting new practices. She loved the work, and after two years, it led to a curriculum development director gig at a district near Grand Rapids, a job which still ranks as her all-time favorite. “I basically was able to do all the fun stuff,” Bazzi says. “My job was to listen to the things that teachers or students or administrators needed help with and then figure out how we could do that at a high level. I had no direct reports, no evaluations. I just got to be the creative, fun person and help everybody.”

"I remember at the end of my first year, I was talking with my teaching partner who was next door, and I told her ‘I’m never coming back. I’m going back to Ford!’ I was semi-joking. Semi. But I was exhausted. And she literally put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Hey, go have a good summer, relax, but I’ll see you next door. After a week or two, you’ll be fine.'"

Given her passion for new ideas and now with some substantive administrative experience under her belt, a superintendent position was probably inevitable. Her first was at a rural district in west Michigan with barely a thousand students — an experience she still cherishes because of the skills you build in a place with an all-hands-on-deck culture. She talks about leading Ferndale schools, her next stop, the way a proud parent talks about their cool kid with an independent streak. Bazzi came in at a time when school choice was triggering enrollment and financial churn for metro Detroit districts, and under Bazzi’s leadership, Ferndale stabilized enrollment, improved achievement and passed a bond for a new lower elementary school. “Ferndale is a hidden jewel,” she says. “People don’t realize it, but it actually serves four different municipalities, so it’s a very diverse district. In many communities, people have lost connection with their local schools, but I think it’s a great example of what you can accomplish if people are willing to come together, and everybody’s rowing in the same direction.”

More recently, Bazzi has taken a new post, one which she expects will be a more permanent stop. As the superintendent of West Bloomfield School District, she’s again leading a community brimming with diversity and anxious for new ideas. Defying images of the ethnically homogenous outer suburbs, the schools serve large Jewish and Chaldean communities, African American students, who make up about 40 percent of enrollment, and numerous immigrant communities. In all, 61 languages are spoken in West Bloomfield schools. Bazzi says it’s also a district with a history of embracing new ways of doing things. Right now, that means pushing for more diversified learning opportunities, especially focused programs in the trades, career preparation and STEAM. It’s something that’s a big part of their messaging as they advocate for a new bond proposal, which will be in front of voters later this year. She says it makes it a little easier that another bond is expiring, so people will either see their taxes stay the same, if it passes, or go down a little, if the bond fails. Bazzi is hopeful that the community will choose to have strong schools at the heart of their community over a tax break.

Bazzi says West Bloomfield is indeed still one of those places where the schools feel like the center of gravity of community life. Even so, she’s not taking that ethos for granted. Bazzi says she mostly tries to stay out of politics, but her positions are pretty firm when it comes to some of the issues that have recently divided communities and eroded faith in public schools. “To me, and to my parents, our public schools were always one of the things that felt very special about this country,” Bazzi says. “It was a collective commitment that a free, quality education was something every child needed and deserved. I’d be disappointed to see us lose that. I see parents chasing the ‘best-rated’ schools, or being wary, whether consciously or unconsciously, of districts that serve students with lower socioeconomic status or that may be going through troublesome times. But I wish people understood this kind of diversity is part of what makes a school strong. Your child isn’t going to lose out on anything because they sit next to a kid who has different circumstances. They’re going to gain from that. I see it all the time. Our schools are here to ensure that some baseline level of equity in our world can exist. They are not the whole solution, but if we abandon ship on our public schools, I don’t see how this helps anyone. The world is diverse. The world is complex. And I think we’re all better off when we face it together.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Alumni Engagement

Mathematics and Statistics

Education

Off

Wed, 02/08/2023 - 19:09

The two-time ��-Dearborn alum and West Bloomfield superintendent talks about why she’s dedicated her life to education and what we stand to lose when we abandon our faith in public schools.

From left, ��-Dearborn alum Dania Bazzi, her sons Danny and Norman, her niece Celine Haidous, and husband Zach cheer on the West Bloomfield high school football team. Photo courtesy Dania Bazzi

What we’re missing when we simplify MLK’s life and legacy

lblouin — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 16:02:37 +0000

What we’re missing when we simplify MLK’s life and legacy lblouin Mon, 01/16/2023 - 11:02

Like most Americans, ��-Dearborn Associate Professor of African and African American Studies Terri Laws finds Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech inspiring. But it’s the first two thirds of the speech rather than the oft-quoted “flourish” of its conclusion that speak to her most deeply. Indeed, review the text and you’ll see King spends most of the speech laying out a persuasive moral argument for civil rights based on the most cherished principles of the country’s founding documents. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King said. “This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

Laws thinks our tendency to focus on the more quotable, rhetorically uplifting parts of the speech are indicative of a larger cultural impulse to simplify King — to lionize the less controversial parts of his life and philosophy and diminish or erase his more complex, often radical ideas. Earlier this month we chatted with Laws about this topic, why she thinks King is particularly relevant today, and why her connection to him feels personal. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So I noticed you have a quote from King in your email signature. And it’s not the kind of inspirational, universal-truth-type quote you often see featured — or misquoted. It reads, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death." Tell us why that quote is important to you.

Associate Professor Terri Laws

That’s actually been my signature for years. I did make the font red at some point! But it’s been with me for a long time because it’s really representative of the work I try to achieve. The biggest area of my research is health inequity and health disparities, which is a multifaceted and interdisciplinary field. In addition to exploring how systems create inequalities, I am interested in moral aspects of eliminating health inequity and how African American religious thought and practices as collective action contribute to correcting inequality, whatever the cause. This particular quote shows the breadth of Martin Luther King. To the best of our understanding, he said this in 1966 at a press conference before he addressed an interracial medical group that was trying to push for healthcare as a human right. That group was important because there had long been segregated associations for medical professionals and segregated healthcare, and so here we see King doing the work we saw him doing in every other area of life, namely, to locate inequality where equality needs to be. This was, of course, at a time when terms like health disparities or health inequity did not yet exist, so it was very forward looking.

The key word in the quote is “inhuman,” and it’s interesting to me, because the quote is sometimes written instead with the word “inhumane.” But scholar Charlene Galarneau, who had an interest in this particular quote, did some research to figure out what he actually said, and it appears that he said “inhuman.” This matters, one, because King gets misquoted so often, but also because “inhuman” is a much deeper concept. We have so many examples of people wanting to see him in more benign ways, and to me, for him to say “inhuman” showcases the more radical King. To say that something is “inhumane,” that’s a word we use more broadly to express judgment about a certain meanness in behaviors, including toward animals. But to say something is “inhuman” means someone is failing to see the humanity of a person at all. It is an entirely different level of disrespect and devaluing to judge that people aren’t even deserving of life.

And as you mentioned, it’s an example of this larger issue that American culture has reshaped King to be a simpler, less challenging, less controversial figure than he actually was. Can you talk more about that phenomenon? And in the interest of complicating the story, can we dive into some of the areas where popular images of King fall especially short?

Well, my frame of reference for this is often my students, who are typically coming in with fairly limited knowledge of King. So, for example, when I’m teaching African American Religious Experience, and we get to that part of Black religious history, I want students to understand that he’s more than “Reverend King who preached.” In many sectors of our society, religion has been diminished, so students need to understand the historical, public role of the pastor in Black communities. And this particular pastor is a Ph.D.-prepared systematic theologian. King has undertaken deep study about the nature of God and God’s relationship to humans, and he has the training to argue and reform doctrines. As an outgrowth of his beliefs and research, one of the central themes of his preaching, writing and activism is that despite the inferiorities that Black people have been taught about themselves, God made you as a person and Black people are equal beings in the eyes of God. He then takes this concept of personhood and makes an argument based on the foundational documents of the United States. That’s what makes the entirety of the “I Have a Dream” speech so important. In saying that the United States has given Black folk a check that we can’t cash, he’s making a statement that there is a birthright to this equality. There is a divine birthright. But there is also a legal and civil birthright based on the creeds that are foundational to the type of society we claim to stand for.

Another example that I often see in my students is how they contrast King with Malcolm X. Students are very interested in Malcolm X, and not to oversimplify things myself, but they think he’s so cool! Some are interested because of his conversion to Islam, which may be something of specific interest to our campus, and the religious diversity among Africans and African Americans. Some students are interested in Malcolm X’s outspokenness. Some are interested because they connect him with the Black Power movement. But most often, for them, he’s set in contrast with King. To them, King believed in equality and nonviolence through passive methods, and Malcolm is radical and willing to consider defensive violence so he’s the cool one.

But if you look at, say, the origins of the term “Black Power,” the story is more complicated. We know that the phrase Black Power was popularized by Stokely Carmichael, who was then a leader in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and it comes out of this march that took place in 1966. A man named James Meredith became the first Black student admitted at the University of Mississippi. Later, he decided to do a march across the state as a march against fear. A sniper shoots him on the first day, and so King and Floyd McKissick of the Congress for Racial Equality go to Memphis where Meredith is hospitalized. They talk with him and they decide that they are going to continue the march for him. As they are visiting with him, Carmichael shows up, and by this point, he is getting a little tired of the nonviolence philosophy, though they all agree that they’re going to try to do this march. All along the way, however, they’re having these deep conversations about the continuing use of nonviolence as a strategy, which King thought was critical to keeping the movement an interracial one. But during the march, Carmichael and Willie Ricks, who was thought to be the originator of the term Black Power, start this chant: “What do we want? Black Power!” And King is pretty disappointed. He saw Black Power as a slogan, and one the media would not be willing to let go of. He argued for the slogan to demand “Black Equality.” Carmichael argued that it had to be power, because power is what is used against us. King’s concern was when you put white power against Black power, you’re inviting a clash, and he felt deeply this had to be an interracial movement.

My point is this was a nuanced, complex, real debate they were having. Furthermore, King and Carmichael had a good enough relationship where they were actually talking about these things. King, as well as other ministers, continued to evolve their version of the slogan. In the Detroit Studies course, for example, I have assigned a King essay in which he lays out his explanation of Black Power. It’s important in that class for his connections to Detroit as an economic engine and for the political skills learned through Black participation in the labor movement. So you can’t just make it an easy narrative, like Malcolm X is cool, and King is not. Fill in what’s behind the narrative, don’t reify it, and understand it in all its fullness.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X have a chance encounter in the hallway during the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was the first and only time they met. Malcolm X was assassinated the following year. Credit: Library of Congress

That’s super fascinating. How about one more example of an area where you think our perceptions of King would benefit from a deeper reading of history.

I don't think we give enough attention to how much he was really unpopular — even among people who we commonly think of as allies of the Civil Rights Movement. In particular, King started making connections between economic conditions in our country and what was happening with the Vietnam War. For him, spending money on a war, in which we were disproportionately drafting Black Americans and killing people of color, was money that could then not be spent at home to alleviate the inequitable conditions for the same people in this country. That lost him the favor of President Johnson, which meant that he had to decide whether he was going to stop making these connections, or risk putting the movement in jeopardy. As a moral thinker, he is unable to disconnect himself from the immorality of a war that was harming people both around the globe and in this country. King was interested in full Black citizenship and humanity, but when he turned to economic inequality and matters of national concern that moved beyond race, that made him unpopular, and we forget that. And even thinking of the famous audio of Bobby Kennedy landing in Indianapolis, announcing that King has been shot and has died. The crowd gasps in horror. But this was the same man who, as attorney general, signed off on federal surveillance of King when FBI Director Hoover saw him as a security threat to the nation.

These are the kinds of complexities we don’t think about when we only focus on the version of King that we apparently have decided is the version that K-12 students, or the parents of K-12 students, can accept. But my experience is that students are ready for controversies. They’re ready to learn about a deeper King than the one they learned about in 4th grade and the one they hear about leading up to the third Monday in January. I think we do a disservice to ourselves as a country when we only tell the clean parts of our history, because we’re missing an opportunity to reflect on what that means for the present moment and where we’re going as a nation. Even then, it can be a challenging exercise. For example, every year, folks ask questions about what King would think about contemporary subjects. I don’t typically join in those conversations. Ethically, it’s difficult to do more than guess the moral stance across generations. That said, as someone who studies inequity and culturally based tools to help eliminate inequality, and who is a couple of generations removed from my students, I often think about the types of social investments that were made during my youth, like investments in public schools and expanded rights. So I think understanding the complexities of King’s thought helps today’s generations make decisions for their own forms of activism and what gaps they want closed for themselves and for their children.

Well, that begs the question, what do you think about commemorations like MLK Day?

First, I would say my relationship to King is something that is intellectual, spiritual, but also deeply personal. I’m not a King scholar; I’d consider myself sort of a King hobbyist, and as a young person, much of what I learned about him were things I learned because I was driven by my own curiosities. I have had friends remind me that before King’s birthday was a holiday, I would do things like search newspapers for what happened in the days following his assassination. Later in life, I went to seminary at a place in Atlanta that Daddy King and Benjamin Mays, one of King’s mentors, had helped start.

Regarding commemorations, part of me has come to understand that commemorations occur on lots of different levels. Honestly, how I feel right now is for the people who need the specifics of that day, even if it’s a more cursory version, let them have it. It’s ultimately more important to remember than to labor over the specifics of how we remember. For me personally, one of the most important ways commemorations can occur is as the ritual of remembrance, and specifically, in a way that helps us move to what’s next. Given this specific moment in our history, this is a time for us to really decide as a nation where we are going. In the last year of King’s life, he wrote a book called “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” and he’s really asking, are we going to live these values that we say we want to live and by what methods and strategies will we pursue them? Today, we can’t even elect a Speaker of the House, we can’t do the people’s business, because we are arguing about who we want to be. In political polling, more Americans are willing to say they believe violence can be an appropriate response to disagreement with our government. That’s where we are right now as a country, and it’s not dissimilar to 1963. 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the Birmingham Campaign; Kennedy’s speech on civil rights legislation, which Johnson carried forward after Kennedy was assassinated that November; and the March on Washington, the most famous event of that pivotal year. And so there’s an opportunity to reflect more deeply about what King had to say about his own similar moment in history, to see if there are moral guideposts for our own way forward.

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Terri Laws is an associate professor of African and African American Studies. Her teaching and research interests include Women's and Gender Studies, inequality, race and health, and religion and health. Interview by Lou Blouin.

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Social Sciences

Off

Mon, 01/16/2023 - 15:59

Associate Professor Terri Laws thinks honoring Martin Luther King Jr. must start with a more thorough reckoning with his thought, his place in history and his relevance for today.

Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol about the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Credit: Library of Congress

When content isn’t king

lblouin — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:52:37 +0000

When content isn’t king lblouin Wed, 11/09/2022 - 11:52

Many ��-Dearborn faculty and administrators are currently engaged in an effort to transition 3-credit courses to 4 credits. The thinking behind the Four-Credit Transition Initiative is that if faculty are able to focus on two 4-credit courses per semester instead of three 3-credit courses, they’ll have more time and energy to work on other things they enjoy, like research, course development and new initiatives. The question of how to transition a course, however, isn't always straightforward, according to Instructional Designer Autumm Caines. “A lot of people think adding that extra credit hour means adding more content — like, you could just add a couple extra readings,” Caines says. “But from a design perspective, that’s certainly not the only option or probably the best one. You could actually keep the amount of content the same, but go deeper. In some cases, an instructor might think about reducing content.”

So how does the idea of less content jibe with adding an extra credit hour? First, it helps to understand that when Caines talks about reducing content or increasing credit hours but keeping the amount of content the same, she’s not talking about making classes lighter-weight or less challenging. Rather, it’s about being conscious of the amount of material that students can realistically learn, given the time constraints of the course, and finding ways to use that time to produce learning outcomes that last. For example, let’s say an instructor has traditionally organized a 3-credit course around 12 core subjects. With an extra credit hour to play with, they could potentially cover 16 subjects. Or, Caines says, they could stick with 12 and add different kinds of learning activities that allow students more exploration in those essential areas. A unit that is usually covered by a textbook chapter and lecture could be developed further with an active assignment that asks students to apply what they’ve learned to a problem facing their own community, or engage in a group project, or write a personal reflection about how a key concept relates to something in their lives. Caines says the possibilities for these types of active learning assignments are basically unlimited.

The approach of going deeper with less material is gaining momentum in academia, in part, because emerging research suggests it enhances learning. Caines points to recent work from Bryan Dewsbury, an associate professor of biological sciences at Florida International University and current scholar in residence at ��-Dearborn, who’s an expert in inclusive teaching, a philosophy that emphasizes providing equal opportunities for students of all backgrounds to have successful learning experiences. In Dewsbury and his co-authors’ 2022 study, they followed students over two semesters of sequential introductory biology courses that used different instructional formats. During the first semester, three sections of the intro course used a traditional lecture format. A fourth mixed active learning and inclusive teaching with a reduction in content to make room for these more learning-centered pedagogies. In the second semester, students took either a lecture-based section or an active learning one. The result: Students who took the non-lecture sections both semesters had the highest grades in their 200-level biology courses the following year, with students from traditionally underrepresented identities showing some of the largest gains. Caines says outcomes like this suggest that active learning and inclusive teaching approaches help students hold on to the information and skills they’re learning because they’re able to spend more time with the content and experience it in different ways. It’s also a counterpoint to one of the most common arguments against active learning — namely, that it might be a good idea, but there simply isn’t time for it if students are going to get through all the material an instructor has deemed important. “But if students aren’t holding on to what they’ve learned beyond the course, that’s obviously not a great thing. What we’re seeing is more content doesn’t equal more learning,” Caines says.

Grace Helms-Kotre, a social work lecturer on both the Dearborn and Ann Arbor campuses, describes it as the difference between “making a point and driving a point home.” Over the past several years, she’s revised her Stress Management course multiple times, and each time it’s trended in the direction of less content. Initially, her course was organized around a traditional (thick) textbook, lots of assigned reading, quizzes and tests. But she noticed that the pace of the class and amount of material they were covering meant students were often just regurgitating the material on quizzes and tests rather than experiencing any kind of transformative learning. So she reduced the amount of required reading, shrunk the textbook, cut the number of core topics to just the essentials, and added some active assignments. For example, rather than assigning all the reading, sometimes she asks students to go find an article or video on the topic themselves and do a report back to her or the class. Often, she assigns a reflection piece that challenges students to engage with the material in a personal way. Helms-Kotre says the new approach has paid all kinds of dividends, including in richer class discussions and students reporting positive changes in their daily lives. Now, the most common feedback she gets about her course is that “it’s a class I’m really getting a lot out of.”

Incidentally, Caines finds student perceptions of active learning to be another interesting area of emerging research. She points to a Harvard study that found outcomes similar to Dewsbury’s recent research when it comes to learning outcomes. “But when students were asked how they felt they were doing, the students in the active learning and inclusive teaching sections felt like they weren’t doing as well, even though they were doing better. And the students in the lecture class felt like they were doing great, even though they weren’t doing as well.” Caines suspects this may have to do with the nature of active learning assignments. They’re usually less prescribed, less predictable, involve problem solving or innovating, and rarely reduce to right and wrong answers. As such, uncertainty and failure are par for the course. In some cases, trying and failing and trying again might lead to the deepest learning experience of all. But as we make our classes more active and inclusive, Caines says that’s a lesson we’ll have to help our students understand. “The way I explain it to students is that it’s sort of like going to the gym when you haven’t been working out for a while,” she says. “The sore muscles don’t feel good, but that’s an indication it’s working. So if you feel like you’re struggling with this stuff, that’s completely normal. It might even mean you’re on the right track.”

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Want to dive deeper into this topic? Check out Caines’ recent post on The Hub blog discussing why it’s important that we pay close attention to how much time students are spending on course-related tasks. Story by Lou Blouin.

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Wed, 11/09/2022 - 16:51

To boost learning, faculty should cut material. Wait, what?

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Images by kegfire, Rawf8, gearstd via Adobe Stock

Practicing hope in the age of climate change

lblouin — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:17:57 +0000

Practicing hope in the age of climate change lblouin Wed, 11/02/2022 - 12:17

Assistant Professor of Health and Human Services Finn Bell has been an activist and organizer in “social justice-y” circles for 20 years. But environmental justice and climate issues, now two of his academic specialties, are both relatively recent additions to his repertoire. He describes the mingling of those topics into his life and academic work in terms that may sound familiar to many of us who’ve recently found ourselves thinking more seriously about climate change. Encounters with novels like Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” helped broaden his imagination about the connections between climate change, inequality and political power. Damaging flooding in 2013 in semi-arid Denver, where he’d recently moved from, made real the freak severe weather events that climate scientists were predicting. A talk at the Ann Arbor campus by environmental activist Winona LaDuke scared him a little. “Her message was basically that we are addicted to fossil fuels, and unless we all quit this addiction right this second, we’re all going to die,” Bell says. “And I was, like, whew, OK! And especially because, as a social worker and someone who’s worked in the area of addiction, you know that abstinence-only messages don’t work! So viewed through that lens, I guess we’re all going to die.”

For Bell, the seriousness of the subject doesn’t preclude a sense of humor. That’s partly because it’s his personality, but also because his particular approach to the topic of climate change is predominantly a human, sometimes unconventional, one. While most discussions of climate resilience focus on emerging technologies or big infrastructure projects, Bell is most interested in small communities of people modeling unique behaviors that could become useful in a world transformed by climate change. Some of his earliest work focused on an eco-justice center in the rural Midwest that was run by Catholic nuns. Bell spent months living at the center and working on the farm that sold its vegetables to local people via a CSA, a community supported agriculture model in which customers invest in the farm ahead of the growing season and get fresh produce as a return on that investment. He was impressed by many aspects of the nuns’ approach: their ability to transition from a social justice perspective focused on issues like prisoner advocacy and death penalty opposition, to a broader paradigm that incorporated environmentalism and agriculture; their “radical commitment” to each other, including their ability to care for their elders; and a level of frugality he’d never seen before. Regarding the latter, Bell counted himself as someone who’d “recently awakened” to environmental issues and was trying to be more conscious about his own use of resources. “I was in that mode where I was saving the Saran wrap from the coffee shop brownie to pick up my dog’s poop. That was nothing compared to the sisters,” Bell says. “If you dropped a seed while you were planting, there was a set of tweezers to pick up the seed. When my landline phone stopped working, there was a box of cords they’d saved and we went through the box to find a replacement.”

Bell preparing beds for planting at We the People Opportunity Farm in Ypsilanti.

Soon after, Bell got a chance to more directly blend his previous work on racial and economic justice with his newer interest in agriculture. For his doctoral dissertation work, he met with small growers in the Ypsilanti area, focusing specifically on the experiences of farmers and gardeners who were Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) or lower-income. He talked with them about how they got interested in growing, how they learned to do it, the challenge of accessing land in an area facing intense development pressure, and how they were thinking about climate change. Their experiences varied, but Bell observed some common threads. First, growing food was really, really important to them. It provided economic and health benefits, as well as a sense of community and self-reliance. Moreover, Bell noted that the growers he spoke with were very outwardly focused. “It was the opposite of a hoarder or prepper mindset,” he says. “Their approach wasn’t individual, all against all. It was, how can I share what I’ve learned, how can I share the food I’ve grown, how can I uplift my community and make it stronger?”

Notably, this mindset isn’t something that prevails in all communities Bell has encountered. In fact, one of the big things that inspired Bell to study BIPOC and working class growers was a prior experience with a mostly white group that had a decidedly different approach to climate resilience. It was a complex group of people. He says they were generally on the left end of the political spectrum. They identified with many traditional social justice causes. And while putting them in the prepper camp wouldn’t be quite right, “apocalyptic” themes were common in their discussions. Bell noticed that, like the nuns and Ypsilanti farmers he knew, the group thought a lot about alternative ways of doing things for an era in which resources were potentially scarce. But, unlike the nuns and Ypsi growers, people in the group were not currently experiencing scarcity themselves and the discussion of who would benefit focused more exclusively on the members of that group. Talk of sharing ideas and skills they were developing to uplift the racially diverse local community wasn't front and center.

For Bell, one of the big takeaways from his work so far is the idea that adjusting to the economic, political and environmental transitions of the climate change era will take more than renewable energy and bigger seawalls. It’s going to take cultivating alternative social structures, new behaviors, traditions and ways of relating to each other that equip us to cope with a road ahead in which good outcomes aren’t predictable or guaranteed. When Bell is occupying this headspace, he often thinks of a quote — one he comically first encountered hanging in his mother’s bathroom — from dissident, playwright and Czechoslovakia’s last President Václav Havel. “It’s a long quote, so I’ll summarize, but he’s basically saying hope is the belief that what you’re doing matters,” Bell explains. “Hope is not optimism. It’s not this hope that everything will be fine, because then you don’t actually have to do anything about it. As ecophilosopher Joanna Macy says, hope is a practice, like gardening or Tai chi. It’s investing in what you want to see in the world. It’s figuring out how to live now in a way that creates the world you want to live in.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

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