As a student writing his thesis on speech recognition at the MIT AI Lab (now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), Dan Huttenlocher worked closely with Professor Victor Zue. Known for pioneering the development of systems that allowed users to interact with computers using spoken language, Zue frequently traveled to Asia, where most of the early speech recognition research took place in the 1980s. Huttenlocher sometimes accompanied the professor on these trips, many of which, he recalls, involved interactions with members of the MIT Industrial Liaison Program. “It was a huge opportunity,” says Huttenlocher, “and largely contributed to my interest in working with companies and industry, in addition to the academic side of research.”
Huttenlocher earned a PhD in computer vision from the Institute and has since embarked on a career spanning academia, industry and the philanthropic sector. In addition to establishing himself as a respected researcher in academia, he spent 12 years as a research scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center before leaving to co-found the financial technology company. He served on the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 2010 to 2022 (including as chairman since 2018) and has served on the boards of Amazon.com and Corning, Inc. He also helped found Cornell Tech, a technology, business, law and design campus in Modern York built by Cornell University. There, he served as the school’s first dean and vice chancellor, leading its efforts to bridge industry and computing to improve Modern York’s technology ecosystem.
Today, Huttenlocher serves as the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. To emphasize the importance of this moment in time and the need for an interdisciplinary computing center such as a school of computer science, he refers to the oft-quoted forecast this software would engulf and disrupt established industry structures. Huttenlocher believes that while this view was correct, what we are currently experiencing is something different, greater, and with enormous consequences for humanity. Computing as a whole – not just software, but also hardware, algorithms, and machine learning – has evolved to the point that it is redefining our approach to problem solving in almost every industry sector, discipline, and research area. This suggests that it also means a redefinition of the reality we experience.
Thanks to Huttenlocher’s leadership, the college is both a recognition of and a response to a up-to-date era of computing. Explores ways to support but also lead the technological changes that are changing the world. According to Huttenlocher, the key to the program is its two-pronged, interdisciplinary approach. “We want to take the most important results in computer science and combine them with other disciplines,” he says. “That means helping non-computer science departments expand into computer science, but we also want to help computer science fields expand into other disciplines.” To achieve this, Huttenlocher and the college strive to establish mighty connections and collaborations in education and research between computer science and a broad range of disciplines at MIT, across all five schools, departments, and programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
From an operational standpoint, the university has only been around for three years, but Huttenlocher has already overseen the implementation of several programs and initiatives aimed at combining computer science with other disciplines. MIT has committed to creating 50 up-to-date faculty positions for the university: 25 in computer science and artificial intelligence, and 25 joint positions rooted in other academic departments that do not focus primarily on computer science. So far, it has hired 25 up-to-date researchers, including half a dozen in shared positions.
He also oversaw the development of Common Ground for Computing Education, a platform that brings together experts from departments across the Institute for development and teaching new coursesand run programs that combine computer science with other disciplines. Its goal is to leverage the ubiquity of computer science through a coordinated approach to computer science education at the Institute. Current joint thematic offerings include “Interactive Data Visualization and Society,” “Real-World Problem Solving with Optimization and Computational Imaging: Physics to Algorithms,” and “Julia: Real-World Problem Solving with Computation.”
The Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) is a cross-cutting initiative that encourages the responsible development and deployment of technology by incorporating insights and methods from the humanities and social sciences, with an emphasis on social responsibility. “SERC brings together many perspectives—sociologists and humanities, engineers and computer scientists—because understanding the social and ethical challenges of computing relies largely on combining expertise from these disciplines,” Huttenlocher says. The initiative is based on a clearly defined framework of teaching, research and engagement that aims to assess the broad challenges and opportunities of computing while fostering what it calls “responsible habits of thought and action” among MIT students who create and implement computing technologies . To prove demand and impact, in 2021, more than 2,100 students enrolled in subjects where SERC worked with instructors to integrate social and ethical considerations into the curriculum.
In his book “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” (Little, Brown, 2021), co-authored with Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, Huttenlocher explores how artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the way we view ourselves as human beings , our role in society, the way we see the world around us, and the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration to define the future. Reflecting on what he and his colleagues have been able to accomplish at the university in such a tiny time, Huttenlocher states that he is impressed and proud of what so many MIT employees have already contributed to. But that the work is still far from complete: “I think we’re getting to the point now where we’re starting to have an impact in some parts of MIT, but we’re working toward a broad impact, connecting computer science with disciplines across the Institute — that’s the aspiration of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing,” he says.