Observations by Gianna Martinengo

President of Didael Srl and Chairperson of the Women & Technologies Conference

 

Milan, 19^th January 2009

 

In the following, I tried to write a summary not only of the ideas, but of the experiences that Nik Nailah Binti Abdullah imparted to us.

After re-examining what I know of her, and what she herself claims, I found three far from banal “messages” that I believe merit some reflection. In order, these are her personal history (strongly linked to her professional history), her scientific message and her technical messages. Below, in the same order, are my own observations.

 

Nailah (this is what I will call her from now on: the name used by her loved ones) is a researcher who came from far away and will probably go far in the future. Following a strict Muslim upbringing in a privileged family from Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Nailah followed in her father's, brothers' and relatives' footsteps: she left Malaysia as soon as she could to pursue a high-level education in a field she enjoyed. Influenced by her father, who had missed out on a Computer Science degree (which he would have liked to achieve at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon) and had had to fall back on a more practical business and management course, Nailah obtained a Bachelor's in Computer Science and then went to Singapore...for a year-long internship, with a research component, in one of the world's richest and toughest universities. She wrote an article with her supervisor and sent it to a conference in Bulgaria (AIMSA 2000); the article was accepted and Nailah, while being unable to attend the conference, contacted its president (Stefano Cerri, a professor in Montpellier, France) via e-mail and expressed her wish to undertake a Ph.D in Europe. After almost a year of unsuccessful attempts to find funding for her enrolment in the Master's degree in Montpellier, her family agreed to finance one year's study in Europe. She arrived in Montpellier (2001) knowing hardly any French and moreover continuing to wear the traditional veil. After a year, she obtained the Master's degree, taking all her exams in French (including one on the elaboration of French natural language) and writing only her dissertation in English. And then, again, the search for funds for her thesis began; months of e-mail exchanges passed; and finally three Malaysian companies offered her the grant and Nailah began her doctorate on a topic...that she changed after two years. Since 2004, she has worked on the topic we will address below.

 

In my opinion, her entire personal history is noteworthy:

 

 

And now a few words on scientific perceptiveness, on creativity at the interface between art, science and technology.

 

Nailah's work takes a “holistic^[1]”approach that refutes the classical “divide and conquer” method of solving real problems. In other words, this approach prescribes that the field of Informatics should, in future: a. accept people as an integral part of any problem's solution; and thus that b. the solution should be found by giving psychological, linguistic and anthropological (human) issues as much attention as technical (informatics) ones.

 

Naturally, this requires a good knowledge of the real behaviour of individuals in practical contexts (situations), which can only be gained via an analysis of conversations (chat and video conference texts). These conversations represent the “natural” source of Information relating to the communication, and thus the operational, events of virtual communities that undertake long-distance collaborative activities. To Nailah, chat and video conference texts make up an experimental terrain not dissimilar to that provided to Galileo by the tower of Pisa: a context in which to evaluate “natural” phenomena in order to construct formal scientific interpretations (theories) that can help us to understand and predict nature (and master it to make use of its riches).

 

But why study human collaborative activities? Because real problems are now too complex to be approached “by a single expert” and thus require that synergies be created between different skills. This naturally creates certain significant problems in terms of the definition(s) of concepts (and agreement on the protocols of conversations), which is why Nailah's cross domain analysis is important: it represents all those cases in which multiple experts are required to solve a complex common problem, such as the case of European research projects or conversations between scientists simulating a landing on Mars (a NASA project referred to by Nailah). Thus, in contrast to the traditional approach of research-technicians, who sometimes appeared to create solutions in search of a problem, Nailah has invested years of relentless, detailed research activity in the understanding of human communication as mediated by technology. All this in order to uncover those recurring properties of conversations that have thus far only rarely been the objects of formal analysis. Indeed, the most important aspect of Nailah's scientific activity consists not only of the analyses of conversations, undertaken based on noted psychological, linguistic and anthropological theories, but of the attempt to extract their properties in a formal manner so that automatic analytical procedures might be constructed to do so in future. Thus, in other words, the aim is to create a new measurable (and hence usable) “theory” of human collaboration in an inter-disciplinary context.

 

Lastly, I'll conclude with a few observations regarding Nailah's technical messages. I think the first consists of the meticulous care with which she considers the potential applications of her work. The second relates to her obstinate efforts to spread information over the years, for example by hosting seminars directed at the general public, such as the one she is offering in Milan. The third has to do with her exhaustive work ethic and its dedication to the need to reflect on the relationship between technologies and their use in context, rather than their independent anatomy (what they're made of) or physiology (what they're made for).

 

I'd like to emphasise this last message, and its modernity in particular: technologies, according to Nailah, do not only emerge from an analysis of the real contexts in which they are used, but actually contribute to changes in these contexts by existing within them. From a technical perspective, this aspect of “co-adaptation” may seem predictable, banal or obvious, but it isn't at all: for example, let's take a moment to consider the overwhelming effect that this idea could have, and probably will have, in politics. Giorgio Galli claimed as much in the lesson he gave on his 80^th birthday: a new political context could be born thanks to information and communication technologies.

 

I don't know if the results of Nailah's work will be at the very root of these or other changes in the way we work, live and communicate: yet her work appears to provide proof that the nature of research and innovation activity in Informatics is changing, becoming more and more experimental and thus coming to resemble traditional disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry or Biology. Within this new Informatics, people – whether individually or collectively – play a dominant role, which suggests that the integration between 'formal' disciplines and the social sciences (psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology...) will likely lie at the heart of a majority of future technological developments.