With the launch of Issue 7 (Winter 2024) of the SERC Case Studies, we sat down with series editor David Kaiser to talk about the project and his experience with MITops
MIT Open Publishing Services launched in 2021 to provide professional publishing support for open access academic works, and our inaugural project was The MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing from the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. These case studies are peer-reviewed and examine the social, ethical, and policy challenges of present-day efforts in computing. They are now used by more than 1/3 of MIT undergraduates in their courses and have been featured widely in the media.
With the launch of Issue 7 (Winter 2024) this week and over 25 case studies now available, we sat down with series editor David Kaiser (Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT) to talk about the project and the experience of working with MITops.
MIT Press: What are the SERC Case Studies and how did the idea for them come about?
David Kaiser: The MIT Case Studies Series on Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) grew out of cross-campus efforts that colleagues and I recently launched at MIT. Our goal in general is to bring together scholarship and teaching about many aspects of computing, data, and society, to focus on ways that the latest advances are embedded in—and can have dramatic impact upon—people’s lives very broadly. Some of those advances will bring terrific opportunities, but too often they have come with unanticipated consequences; in several well-documented instances, they have exacerbated existing inequalities.
Our goal with SERC generally, and with the SERC Case Studies series in particular, is to bring together insights from thoughtful researchers across the sciences, engineering, humanities, arts, and social sciences, in a way that is broadly accessible—to bring important and innovative findings from the specialist, scholarly literature into wider circulation. I’m especially keen to keep the series useful for undergraduate instruction.
MITP: Why was it important to have the Case Studies openly available?
DK: The challenges and opportunities of modern computing impact nearly all of us. We all need to develop resources to think critically about social responsibility—as researchers who design and implement novel technologies, as users and consumers who increasingly rely upon them, and as members of communities for whom the tools increasingly shape civic life and governance. Many of the SERC Case Studies are drawn from experts’ published research studies, but too often the original papers are not easily accessible—either because they are behind subscription paywalls or, more fundamentally, because the specialist publications are written for narrow audiences of fellow specialists.
The goal for the MIT SERC Case Studies series is to make these important ideas accessible broadly—by publishing in a fully open-access format and by working hard to keep the materials brief, straightforward, and clear for wide groups of readers. With recent issues, we have been able to improve access even further, by incorporating audio versions of each SERC case study.
MITP: Why did you select MITops as your publishing partner? What is the value-add of a partner like MITops?
DK: Working with MITops has been a wonderful experience. The team works very hard to keep the online platform easy to use and navigate; to produce stunning, polished layouts for each case study; and also to work with me to create compelling multimedia supplements that augment the case study authors’ written work. The MITops team is a dream to work with: constructive team players who are committed to excellence. The SERC series couldn’t exist without their partnership.
MITP: Why did you select MITops as your publishing partner? What is the value-add of a partner like MITops?
DK: Working with MITops has been a wonderful experience. The team works very hard to keep the online platform easy to use and navigate; to produce stunning, polished layouts for each case study; and also to work with me to create compelling multimedia supplements that augment the case study authors’ written work. The MITops team is a dream to work with: constructive team players who are committed to excellence. The SERC series couldn’t exist without their partnership.
MITP: What sort of studies have you published so far? Do any stand out for topic or reach?
DK: The MIT SERC Case Studies series has featured materials by scholars from a wide range of fields, from computer science and the data sciences to historians, philosophers, anthropologists, legal scholars, media-studies scholars, and beyond. A major goal is to make sure the SERC series features cases drawn from around the world, so that the series does not only focus narrowly on examples from North America or Western Europe.
Recent examples include a fascinating case study on public reactions to facial recognition technologies in contemporary China (as gleaned from Chinese-language social media accounts and court cases), and a study of how professionals from several countries in South Asia identified persistent patterns in the ways that the latest generative artificial-intelligence tools, such as text-to-image models, reproduce outdated cultural stereotypes when producing visual representations.
Reflecting this broad scope for the series contents, I am delighted that readership for the series is now global as well: half of all the readers who have accessed the site have done so from outside the United States, with growing readership coming from South America, Africa, and Asia.
MITP: What has the reception been like for the case studies at MIT or elsewhere? Do you have any anecdotal evidence of how they are being used?
DK: Working with partners at the MIT Press, we have been able to help spread the word about the MIT SERC Case Studies Series quite broadly. Some SERC cases have been republished in such venues as Scientific American and Popular Science, and material from the SERC series has been cited in reporting by the BBC, the IEEE Spectrum, and even the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I was especially proud that a recent report on “Fostering Responsible Computing Research” by the US National Academy of Sciences highlighted the MIT SERC Case Studies series as an innovative example of how to intertwine important insights about ethical design and social responsibility into computing curricula.
MITP: What is the plan for the future of the Case Studies project?
DK: My goal is to keep expanding the range of topics highlighted in SERC case studies, as well as encouraging authors to continue to experiment with genre and style. Some SERC Case Studies authors have experimented with short passages of speculative fiction and role-playing exercises, to get readers really engaged with the real-world stakes; others have designed creative demonstrations and group activities to help readers experiment themselves with various datasets and sophisticated models. The more ways that the SERC series can stimulate readers to think critically about technologies, social responsibilities, and communities, the more successful the series will be.
| SERC Case Studies, Issue 7 (Winter 2024) Integrals and Integrity: Generative AI Tries to Learn Cosmology by Bruce A. Bassett Can artificial intelligence (AI) do real scientific research? As a test, we ask whether AI—in the form of GPT-4’s Advanced Data Analytics (ADA) agent—can fully replicate the statistical analysis that led to the discovery of the universe’s accelerating expansion. How Interpretable Is “Interpretable” Machine Learning? by Ho Chit Siu, Kevin Leahy, and Makai Mann The modern machine learning (ML) revolution has led to ML systems deployed at scale for the first time, impacting society beyond computer science experts. It is critical that these systems are integrated appropriately with minimal negative side effects. AI’s Regimes of Representation: A Community-Centered Study of Text-to-Image Models in South Asia by Rida Qadri, Renee Shelby, Cynthia L. Bennett, and Remi Denton This case study presents a community-centered evaluation of South Asian cultural representations in text-to-image (T2I) models and distills lessons for the responsible development of T2I models that allows for recognition of structural inequalities. |
MITops is a scholar-focused, MIT-branded hosting and publishing services operation from the MIT Press. MITops projects include Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing from the Schwarzman College of Computing, Computing the Future: A Decade of Innovation at MIT CSAIL, and the MIT Emerging Technology Case Studies.