This past month in July, I had the chane to attend the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) in St Andrews, Scotland. Frankly, I had seen an email that the program had extended their application deadline and had no significant summer plans, so I decided to apply. I wasn’t exactly sure what the program entailed beyond the public website, and I hadn’t met anyone who had done the program. The theme this year was AI and Nature, which my research largely centers around, especially since I recently published a paper on how AI developers for sustainability think about their work in contrast to the views of climate and environmental advocates. Generously, I was accepted into DISI and was given a travel grant allowing me to attend.
Then I went. It was a whirlwind of programming from 9-5 almost every day. We had visiting faculty from around the world who lectured on topics from complexity science to how drawing works as a cognitive tool to large scale replications of animal and children studies. Some of the topics were waayyy out of my wheelhouse, I haven’t given much thought to P vs NP problems since the early years of my undergraduate education. Even more so, I didn’t know anything about canine and button communication beyond TikTok videos. These lectures were also supplemented with optional seminar sections.
Beyond just the lecturers, there were about fifty early-career academic fellows from early graduate students to postdocs to those starting their professorships in just months. The fellows I met were amazing, largely many of the fellows studied cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and animal cognition. I met people who ordered wooden study apparatuses for their baby subjects, people who sit in zoos with bonobos, and people who travel into the field to take bat recordings. This was a very different environment than with people in RiC who often work in areas similar(ish) to me doing community engaged work. Outside of the academic fellows, there were also artistic fellows who did work like photography, science communication, and sustainable fashion who attended DISI.
In human-computer interaction, my field, summer schools are not as common, so it was fascinating to be able to attend one, even if it pushed me academically well beyond my comfort zone. Towards the end of DISI, the main goal was to create and complete a sprint interdisciplinary project. With five other fellows, we managed to put together some sort of project that involved fairytales, wolves, and NLP.
Beyond just the academic part of the summer, it was refreshing to be outside of the US academic environment right now. DISI is in St Andrews, Scotland, the birthplace of golf, as the many Americans in the pubs will remind you. Moreso, the summer days in Scotland are long and perhaps the most rewarding part was being able to have long walks on the various beaches in St Andrews.