Humanitarian Engineering: Politics and Practice - A new interdisciplinary course on the application of engineering skills to humanitarian challenges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and Purpose: Engineers have an important role to play in the tackling of the world’s complex sustainability and social challenges, solutions to which must, by necessity, involve both technical and social components. As engineers require increasing sociotechnical and interdisciplinary fluency, so too do our curricula need to change. Approach: A new course, Humanitarian Engineering: Politics and Practice, was created in which engineering and arts students work in mixed-discipline teams to propose solutions to real-world humanitarian challenges provided by partnering NGOs. The course introduces engineering design, humanitarian theory, and critical political analysis through interdisciplinary lenses. Outcomes: Survey responses suggest that this course provided a unique and rewarding opportunity for students that helped develop their skills in interdisciplinary collaboration, and shaped the way they think about their professional roles. Conclusions: Given the success of this first offering of the course, it will be offered again, alongside a more deliberate study of learning outcomes of this interdisciplinary approach and its scalability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".