Sharing with you all a quick, one question survey-email for a REMO COST action ethnography on the use of expert systems (so-called artificial intelligence) to ensure the well-being and sustainability of everyone (early career researchers, professors, students, staff,…) involved in campus life, including internet of things campus-wide, even city-wide, and own devices beyond the main software and mobile applications on themselves, through a pan-European science and technology cooperation network on mental health in academia. Anyone wishing to answer, please do so at survey@enricgarcia.md or as a comment.
How to use current day capabilities, what to do in order to improve upon? Should we set a pan-European cooperative task force to achieve the best possible result?
Please feel free to share to anyone that may be interested in providing feedback on the topic. Also working on an Horizon proposal to make such improvement a reality, in case there is anyone interested in joining in such project. Thank you all!
This is not really my area, but having a healthy research environment is a core value of IGDORE, so I am glad to see the discussion on this.
From your post:
Some Mental Health Crisis Response Systems have started to incorporate expert systems or decision support systems to enhance their effectiveness. Expert systems are software applications that use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to emulate the knowledge and decision-making abilities of human experts in a specific domain.
Enric, could you give some examples of specific systems that I could look at for reference?
Should we set a pan-European cooperative task force to achieve the best possible result?
I think international coordination is usually a good idea (and mental health support in academia isn’t the only AI topic that would benefit from more of that!), but given that AI is moving quickly, I worry that a formal task force might have a hard time keeping up. Are there are networks of practitioners/service providers currently working in this space? My feeling is that such organizations may be more agile, and if they don’t exist, maybe there is the space to develop one.
Campus-wide, even CCTV systems and data surveillance could enter this category as expert systems are indeed used to process all that information and trigger responses. Detecting a lone drunk student in a freezing night stumbling across campus? It could call for help. Someone is repeatedly bullied online, it could detect it just as easily as a plagiarism application, at least trigger a warning to address the issue on the classroom. It is really what the systems (in place or not, depending of the country and university) are used for, how the technology is applied: are we really devoting it to ensure the well-being of the community? For profit / security(ies), at some point this research also enters the terrain of, i.e. the one @keithtse recently shared Call for Proposals: The Higher Ed Data Juggernaut | ACADEME BLOG . Mine is mostly on the software side, and specifically on how to use it all for (mental) health and well-being. The bigger context of my research is this network of academics devoted to researcher mental health, of which I am part: Home
