Humans of SymSys: Maika Isogawa

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Maika Isogawa is a sophomore interested in AI. She was a Symbolic Systems Program Summer Research Intern in 2018.

Where are you from? 

I was born in Tokyo, Japan! I lived there until I was about 5, then my family moved to Minnesota. I spent the next few years traveling back and forth between the two.

You took a break from Stanford for a bit. What were you up to? 

I was a professional circus performer. I worked for a show called "Absinthe" by Spiegelworld, and "TOTEM" by Cirque Du Soleil. Both shows were touring, so I lived and worked in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Russia, and Brussels. 

What drew you to SymSys? Why did you pick your current concentration?

When I was younger, I wanted to be an Astrophysicist. Then I came to Stanford thinking I would be a Physics Engineering major. After taking a leave of absence, I came back with a whole new set of interests and goals. Symsys offered the most breadth across all of the domains that I wanted to learn more about. My concentration is Artificial Intelligence. Not only is it a field that is rapidly expanding and innovative, but it also parallels the question of figuring out what we are as human beings, too. 

What’s your favorite SymSys-related class that you’ve taken?

LINGUIST130A - Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics with Chris Potts. I think a professor can really be the difference between a student loving a class vs. hating it - Chris was incredible. Very personable, he kept the class really organized and all of the expectations were set up-front (a simple thing that we don't appreciate until we don't have it). The material was interesting too; it revealed a lot about natural language that we take for granted. NLP is a big question in AI right now too, so I felt like I was learning something that I would actually use in the future.

What's one piece of advice you'd like to offer to younger students?

Be honest with yourself about what you're interested in. It's easy to pursue a major/field for ulterior reasons - maybe its for the promise of financial stability after graduation, maybe it's familial pressure... all valid reasons to pick one path over another. But your time in college will be so much more enjoyable if you're choosing the classes and the path that you actually want to do. 

What's something cool you've worked on? 

Over the summer,  I interned with the HCI department here at Stanford under Mark Whiting and Michael Bernstein. We were researching how teams fractured, using an online environment. In a group of 5 undergraduates, we really got to take initiative with the project: building the entire front-end/back-end of the platform, integrating it with various APIs, gathering data, and submitting a paper to a conference. The work was cool and interesting, but what stood out to me was the people I got to work with every day. Everyone was driven, smart, and so incredibly kind. It was a wonderful environment, and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in this project.

What (loosely) SymSys-related topic are you excited about right now?

Bio-inspired AI. There's actually a ton of new approaches and theories floating around the AI-world at the moment. Implementation is the toughest part, but I'm really excited to see what comes from new research.

What other groups or activities are you involved with at Stanford?

ULTIMATE FRISBEE. LETS. GO. I play for Superfly, Stanford Women's Ultimate team. I tried out thinking that it would be a nice form of exercise, but instead it became some of my most cherished memories and closest friends at Stanford. Not only do I get to workout with incredibly talented, badass women, but ultimate has a huge community all over the Bay Area, and even around the world. Check us out at ultimate.stanford.edu

Humans of SymSys: David Shacklette

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David Shacklette is a new master’s student in Symbolic Systems. He previously studied a B.A. in philosophy at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Where are you from?

I’m from Des Plaines, Illinois.

What's something cool you've worked on? 

During my Junior year abroad at Pembroke College, Oxford, a professor that I worked closely with asked me to be an intern for the Ordered Universe Summer Access program, which focused on the interdisciplinary works of the medieval polymath, Robert Grosseteste. During this week-long experience, I was responsible for holding mock-tutorials for gifted high school students who were interested in applying to Oxford in the following year. It was a highly rewarding experience, and it was so cool to see how a group of bright young minds interpreted such an interdisciplinary topic.  

What drew you to the SymSys MS program? 

I have always been interested in the philosophical interpretation of traditionally non-philosophical disciplines, which led to a strong interest in philosophy of neuroscience. What drew me to the SymSys MS program was the unique opportunity to approach the philosophy of neuroscience in a highly interdisciplinary fashion, surrounded by an incredible community of faculty and students. 

What are some of your initial impressions of Stanford? 

I’m from around Chicago, so my initial impression of Stanford has to do mainly with the weather here-- it’s absolutely gorgeous. 

What's one piece of advice you'd like to offer to younger students?

Take advantage of ALL of the resources that are available to you here. Don’t just be buried in your books 24/7. Go to that talk that you’re interested in, go to the beach for a weekend, join a band, do whatever you can do to become the best person you can be, not just the best academic (but also don’t fail out). 

What (loosely) SymSys-related topic are you excited about right now?

The ethical and practical consequences of optogenetics. 

Coffee Chat with Tobias Gerstenberg

Today we hosted a coffee chat with new psychology professor Tobias Gerstenberg, who studies casuality in cognition, as well as counterfactuals and responsibility. Gerstenberg started off by detailing his journey to where he is now. As a native German, he initially attended university in Berlin, but later completed a MS and PhD at University College London. He then spent five years as a postdoc at MIT in a computational cognitive science group. 

Gerstenberg is excited to be at Stanford due to the cross-departmental collaborations that occur here, or, in some sense, the existence of SymSys at the faculty level. He interested in intersecting social psychology and AI with his own research and taking part in Stanford’s new Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence initiative

As the discussion about causality went on, Gerstenberg showed students the Heider-Simmel animation as an example of how humans infer social variables and attribute causality in very simple stimuli. Towards the end he also showed some examples of stimuli from his own research on intuitive physics, where study participants observe a falling ball hitting obstacles in a box. 

Written by Lucy Li

Humans of SymSys: Zach Harned

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“SymSys offered me a chance to gain experience and specialization in a few important cognate disciplines.”

Zach Harned is a new SymSys master’s student who is also a J.D. Candidate at Stanford Law School. He is the founder of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence & Law Society (SAILS).

What drew you to the SymSys MS program as a law student? 

Much of the legal/policy/regulatory work in emerging technology requires a multi-disciplinary perspective. SymSys offered me a chance to gain experience and specialization in a few important cognate disciplines. 

What's something cool you've worked on at Stanford? 

One of my favorite Stanford projects is the Stanford Artificial Intelligence & Law Society (SAILS), which I founded in November of 2017. Running this organization has been incredibly fun. We created a lecture series where we brought in speakers working at the forefront of legal or policy issues related to artificial intelligence. We were lucky to find numerous stakeholders to help fund our organization, including Law, Science, and Technology, CodeX, and SPICE. 

What kind of research are you hoping to do in the MS program?

I've been focusing my research broadly on the legal implications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is a large and expanding area, so I've been attempting to circumscribe my interest into two main areas. First is FAT/ML, which stands for Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning. The second area is machine learning in healthcare. In these two areas, there are a variety of novel issues, technologies, and techniques continually developing, all of which have a high impact on society. I've submitted a few papers for publication in these areas, that hopefully will be released soon. I was very fortunate to have fantastic collaborators from computer science and medicine to co-author these articles with me. 

What SymSys-related topic are you excited about right now?

Right now I'm heavily focused on how machine vision applications in healthcare will impact legal liability and medical malpractice. This is a fascinating problem, with many distinct players, complicated and cutting-edge technology, and little precedent. I am investigating how this technology impacts physicians themselves, hospitals as organizations, and software or medical device manufacturers.  

Humans of SymSys: Santosh Murugan

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“I took a piece of paper, and wrote down a list of domains that I thought, if there was to be a major breakthrough, would make future generations of humans live in a far better world.”

Santosh is a SymSys senior and Advising Fellow who helps prospective and current students navigate the major. His office hours are Tuesday 3-4pm, Wednesday 2:00-2:55pm, and Thursday 3-5pm in 460-040A.

What drew you to SymSys? What’s your current concentration?

SymSys deals with the fundamental building blocks of what it means to be human: how we think (neuroscience), how we behave (psychology), how we speak (linguistics), how we augment our capabilities (computer science), and why we do these things (philosophy). After deliberating between concentrating in Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction, I chose to pursue HCI first, with the intention of studying AI afterwards (prior to med school).

What’s your favorite SymSys-related class that you’ve taken?

In Spring 2018, I took MED 275: Biodesign Fundamentals to fulfill a requirement in the Human-Computer Interaction concentration. I came into the class with tempered expectations (the medical-device development pathway is notoriously brutal), but was absolutely blown away by the quality of instruction. In that class, I met the eventual co-founder for my biotech startup (read below!), met some incredible medical experts and mentors, and came to really appreciate some of the unique experiences that Stanford offers.

As an AF, What's one piece of advice you'd like to offer to younger students?

One of my favorite athletes, Wayne Gretzky, once said “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

The truth is, within our lifetimes, the world is going to look a lot different than it does currently. The disruption has already started - think about what Amazon has done to the retail industry, or Tesla to the energy/automotive markets, in the last five years alone. The level of disruption effected by these companies is almost unfathomable.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Both NASA and SpaceX are planning for multi-planetary habitation within the next twenty years. Biotechnologies like CRISPR and CAR-T are literally pushing the boundaries of science and human health. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve nearly every industry you can think of. I was in China last month, and saw literally hundreds of posters for AI conferences in street corners and on lamp posts.

I often see younger students struggling to choose what field to go into, and I feel for them- I know what that’s like. I can’t tell you exactly what will work for you, but I can tell you what helped me clarify some of my goals.

Inspired by a speech from a major tech luminary - I took a piece of paper, and wrote down a list of domains that I thought, if there was to be a major breakthrough, would make future generations of humans live in a far better world. Then, I picked the three that seemed most pressing and interesting to me (AI, biotech, and space). Once I had these clear goals (eliminating the paralysis of choice), it became much easier to focus on what was important to me, and to get to work on implementing these visions.

Once you pick your goals, seek advice from mentors, course-correct when necessary, and work diligently. I can’t guarantee that everything will work out, but at least you can rest happily knowing that you’re working to make the world a little brighter for the people around you.

What's something cool you've worked on?

The summer after my freshman year at Stanford, I had the opportunity to work computational genomics/oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston. As part of this work, I shadowed in one of the world’s foremost neuro-oncology clinics at Massachusetts General Hospital. In my time at MGH, I met some of the most incredible patients - people whose entire lives had been upended by their cancer diagnosis, and yet remained some of the most incredibly resilient and inspiring people I’ve ever met. Simultaneously, on the research side, I worked with MDs and PhDs (e.g. Scott Carter and Priscilla Brastianos), who had dedicated their lives to give these patients a second chance, by inventing bio-technologies and designing clinical trials to leverage this technology and deliver it directly to patients. In that summer, I became increasingly inspired to build biomedical technologies that could play a huge role in changing people’s lives for the better.

That inspiration continues to this day. After realizing how devastating chemotherapy-induced hair loss can be for cancer patients, I co-founded a biotech startup dedicated to helping cancer patients keep their hair during and after chemotherapy. That startup graduated from Stanford’s Biodesign NEXT (incubator-style) program, and is continuing to make progress as part of the Cardinal Ventures accelerator. Simultaneously, in my work at NASA this past summer, I went heavy into genetic engineering (in this case, for building multiplanetary habitats via genetically engineered microorganisms) - and hope to apply the same fundamental techniques and knowledge to cure genetics-based human medical problems.

What (loosely) SymSys-related topic are you excited about right now?

Artificial Intelligence is pretty tightly-related to SymSys (it’s actually one of the concentrations), but it’s definitely one of the most exciting topics for me, personally. The fundamental improvements we’ve seen in a variety of fields (e.g. in medicine) as a result of machine learning/AI are mind-blowing; and although there are a lot of issues to be resolved, I’m hopeful that we can use AI to augment our problem-solving capabilities as humans, and help improve a lot of lives.

What other groups or activities are you involved with at Stanford?

I’m on the student board for United Students for Veterans’ Health, which is a nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of life for military veterans in the VA system. These brave people made incredible sacrifices to protect us, and I’m honored to have the opportunity to spend time with them and hear about their life stories. Outside of USVH, I’m also involved with the Office of Community Standards and Organization Conduct Board, and play with Stanford Badminton.