Information Sciences/Systems Archives

Anya Martin is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of social science, artificial intelligence, and meteorology. She received her master’s degree in machine learning from UCLA, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in human-centered computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on infrastructural and human factors in AI/ML applications at a time when AI/ML methods are moving outside of their traditional homes in tech companies. But in this shift and expansion, AI/ML methods are forced to reckon with “alien” infrastructures of data, compute, and trust. This is perhaps most clearly seen with meteorology, where data interoperability is founded on physical law, and where model “trust” is hotly contested given the high-stakes nature of disaster prediction. Anya is studying how these epistemologies of large-scale data interact as it is crucial for understanding where AI/ML methods succeed and fail.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anya is examining how AI is being used to predict the weather in India. Meteorology is a physics-based “big data” science reliant on massive data and compute infrastructures to effectively model the atmosphere. This project aims to understand how these infrastructures work with the new AI/ML methods developed over the last few years, most notably the 2022–2023 AI weather models developed using (almost exclusively) tech company data and compute infrastructure. Anya’s ethnographic work to capture this crucial phase will not only inform AI transition but also provide a critical case study for the effective use of AIs.

Dr. Anol Bhattacherjee is the Exide Professor in information systems and the director of the master’s program in artificial intelligence and business analytics at the University of South Florida. He has authored about 150 refereed publications, including 12 papers in Financial Times, 50 papers in journals, and seven papers in MIS Quarterly, the foremost journal in his discipline. For many years, he was on the editorial boards of MIS Quarterly and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. With nearly 50,000 citations to his credit, a 2021 Stanford University study ranked him as number 12 in the world in career-wide research impact in the information systems discipline. Dr. Bhattacherjee has also authored a copyright-free book on research methods, Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices, which has been downloaded over 2 million times from 229 countries on six continents, used at over 10,000 institutions, and translated into seven languages. His many awards and honors include the Stafford Beer Medal by the Operational Research Society, UK, the Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair in 2019, and the first-place award at the prestigious Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Innovation Cup Competition in 2023.

Dr. Bhattacherjee’s Fulbright-Nehru project is designing AI systems for societal good – such as to reduce societal polarization – and conducting behavioral experiments in terms of the use of these systems by the population and the impacts of such use. The project is collaborating with Indian scholars to conceptualize, design, conduct, and publish research on this topic and related ones. The project also serves several key objectives of the Government of India’s initiatives related to leveraging technology and science for societal benefit and improving human and institutional capacity for scientific research.