Computer Vision News - June 2021

which nurses are assigned to which patients. They control aspects of the operating room schedule. When you study the decision-making tasks, they are actually doing a job that’s more complex than an actual air traffic controller. Currently, they do it today without any decision support. Air traffic controllers were sort of born to do that job. Some people just can’t do it. It’s like at the edges of human capability, these types of jobs, no matter how much training you have. Nurses are trained to do that job in that way too. How do you support them in decision-making? We have a lot of information that’s captured about our air transportation system. We have digital tools. We have substantial national investments in upgrading the structure to support airtraffic control. But nurses today do an equally demanding and challenging job with a piece of pen and paper. The question is: how do you reverse-engineer what it is they are doing, to be able to offer support? Let’s talk about ethics. It seems that the more and more we let machines interact with us humans, instead of solving ethical problems, we are creating more ethical problems. It’s not that we create more ethical problems with the introduction of technology. The ethical challenges are there, but technology and computing accelerate whatever direction we’re going down. I think there needs to be even more emphasis and importance placed on understanding the implications of decisions, both early in the conception of the technology and its implementation, and then thinking at the beginning of the implication for widespread use of the technology for different stakeholders, whether they directly interact with it or for society or communities more broadly. I’m not a philosopher. My training is as an engineer. However, it’s equally my responsibility as a person who has the deepest insight into the technological decisions that we make, to be able to engage and communicate with those of other disciplines and bring that back into the design of the technology. Is my decision support system for the 230 Women in Science