Public Policy
Understanding the policy aspects in technical problems is a key component of all of the Intelligent Diagnostics IGERT program. Fellows will engage in social science inquiry designed to both position the research within its social context and to ensure that social, economic, political, and management needs play their proper roles in defining research goals and objectives. Projects that involve technologies poised well for technological transfer will involve market research studies to evaluate cost and design criteria with limiting constraints for hardware and data constraints within the context of a strong public sector stakeholder and societal needs. The implication of failures of ubiquitous networks (which have subtle effects on end users) will be investigated from the perspective of the end use, neighborhoods, and individual citizens with the aim of developing policy for network specifications and failure response. Management decision-making processes in the public sector will be evaluated with regard to multiple maintenance scenarios and decisions to support infrastructure management. Outputs will be evaluated within the context of all stakeholders.
Fellows will participate in an infrastructure policy case based courses to explore developments of social, economic, and political (SEP) attributes that describe the health of a SEP system, and relate them to SEP observable characteristics. SEP attributes and characteristics may include a wide number of parameters including: public health and safety indicators; perception and response of populations to natural and catastrophic aging of infrastructure systems; influence of Intelligent Diagnostics on the perception and response of the population; decision making structures (related to detection, monitoring, and rehabilitation); and economic impacts. Students will be tooled to navigate social and policy implications related to technology and science based research and will learn to view the entirety of the political system, its outputs, and pose questions to approach public problems, criticize approaches, and identify methods for more connectedness.
Following the first year of the IGERT program Fellows will team with social science graduate students in critical thinking about the SEP impacts of their own research interests. Fellows will implement the models and strategies from the SEP policy courses to put a technical feature of their own current or future dissertation research within the context of the entire political system to identify outputs and impact on society. Each IGERT Fellow will perform an inquiry, teamed with a social science graduate student (supervised by a social science faculty member), to consider the SEP implications of the technical contribution studied by the IGERT Fellow. Fellows will have the benefit of being mentored during their inquiry by major political figures and policy centers housed at NU and UPRM. The inquiry is expected to lead to a peer-reviewed publication to be presented nationally, providing content for an ID IGERT required chapter in each Fellow's dissertation.
