Dr. Jan Dirk Wegner

I think it would be promising to investigate the possibilities that computer science and particularly modern machine learning could offer to improve quality of life while better preserving the environment in greater detail. I also believe that computer science and social science should collaborate much more closely for development. Instead of separate views with (i) either overly technical but ultimately useless approaches or (ii) small-scale initiatives that mostly ignore tools that computer science has to offer, we should spend greater efforts on combining the best of both worlds to come with novel, very large-scale solutions that have high impact in practise.

I have always wanted to direct my research towards improving livelihoods in countries under development. Getting to know ETH colleagues that share the same enthusiasm through ETH4D is a great opportunity to join forces and move interdisciplinary research forward. I am looking forward to joint, interdisciplinary initiatives in research and education organized by ETH4D.

Several projects work on research related to sustainable tropical crop production in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Ivory Coast, and Ghana. I am currently looking into new possibilities to monitor land-use change in Congo since the 1940s together with colleagues from Université Libre de Bruxelles.

I believe that modern machine learning and especially deep learning have great potential to advance development. For example, teaching much larger groups of people in development countries the basics of deep learning, demonstrating how to use the rich set of publicly available software libraries, and giving them access to a cloud service to run their software would spark a massive amount of innovative start-ups I believe. Remote sensing is another promising workhorse to map a large variety of variables from space in an objective, very large-scale way with high temporal resolution. Examples are wealth distribution maps based on night-time imagery, or crop health assessment to reduce famine risk.

Research for and with countries under development offers a lot of exciting research questions while potentially impacting human wellbeing very positively in practice. I also want to emphasize that collaborating with colleagues in countries outside the western prosperity bubble injects completely new ways of thinking and ideas into an otherwise sometimes self-sufficient invention process that has a tendency to only do incremental research. Ignoring the majority of creative minds would mean missing the best ideas altogether. That alone is reason enough to reach out, to actively integrate colleagues from countries under development into our networks, and to provide access to tools that enable progress.

Travel to countries in need of development and get a feeling for culture, people, available resources, and way of working, thinking, and living. Look for personal encounters on the ground rather than merely steering things remotely.