A strong interest in the Humanities has always motivated my intellectual pursuits. I was one of only two Triple Humanities students during my time at Raffles Institution and a member of the Humanities Programme at Hwa Chong. My academic background traverses a range of humanistic disciplines: Literature (my B.A. degree), Theatre and Drama (my M.Phil. in Ibsen Studies), and Philosophy (Ph.D. in Philosophy). A joke I often tell Literature majors is that I spent the majority of my undergraduate years holed up in a library reading philosophical texts. Philosophy has since become my bread and butter (I earn my living off it!), although I am grateful that the wide-ranging nature of Philosophy allows me to venture far and wide and conduct my research in verdant and expansive intellectual pastures.

As a PhD candidate in Philosophy with formal training in Literature, I was initially keen to explore the role that the narrative plays in allowing us to make sense of what we might owe to one another (morally speaking). This became the topic of my doctoral-level dissertation, four chapters of which ended up getting published in academic journals. I then became interested in creative cognition research. How can we better understand the processes and mechanisms underlying creative activity? This interest sprang from my background as a painter in the realist tradition. My interest in human beings naturally drew me from an early age toward the genre of portrait art and away from other genres (e.g., still life, landscape, etc). As an artist, I specialize in the use of India ink and acrylic. A study of Lord Leighton’s Orpheus & Eurydice has been published in Heartbeat Literary Journal (see this link). Over the course of my research, I discovered AI systems that were capable of generating creative output across a range of artistic fields. This culminated in a paper on imagination machines that was eventually published in AI & Society.

In a way, you could argue that my background in painting paved the way for my interest in the philosophy of AI, with creative cognition and creative AI systems functioning as intellectual waystations. The philosophy of AI has since become my research niche, although my work tends to push the boundaries of what might be considered as traditional or standard philosophy. I have collaborated with STEM researchers (mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, medical doctors) to develop Markov models that help medical professionals predict the effects of their policies on the healthcare outcomes of patients and geospatial analytic and other related technological tools that help identify trends in the behaviour of long-tailed macaques, mitigate human-macaque conflict, and promote a harmonious co-existence between human beings and animal wildlife at NTU. I regard AI systems as advanced computational tools that, when appropriately developed and deployed, can help humanity fulfil various goals and ends. At the same time, I am aware that AI systems are often likened to magical silver bullets that can solve any kind of problem. As a philosopher, I see it as my task to de-mystify AI systems, offer a critical perspective, and develop – as best as my collaborators and I can – various human-centred AI tools for specific problems that I care about (e.g., healthcare, nature).

This brings me to my recent exploits as a self-taught programmer. LaTeX is a typesetting program that allows you to generate beautiful mathematical and logical notation (see this link for the LaTeX resources I have created), complex graphs and diagrams, and manuscripts and documents. Having previously taught myself to script in LaTeX, I decided to set myself the challenge of picking up programming languages over the course of COVID-19. In 2019, I picked up the tools (html, css, js) for web-based programming and have gone on to code my personal website (see this link), the research website for my medical AI project (see this link), and an online encyclopedia (of sorts) for my son Henrik (see this link). More recently, I have picked up Python and written programs for a causal calculator (see this link), a Sudoku puzzle generator and solver (see this link), and natural language processing (see this link). My experience has taught me the following: you are never too old to pick up new skills, learning how to programme is analogous to both learning a new language and figuring out how to reason in an even more systematic manner, and the creative process does not differ as much as I thought it might when painting and when writing programs. In its finest moments, AI research may be compared to a neat blend of philosophy and engineering: we dream of what is possible, while remaining aware of the critical limitations of our state-of-the-art AI systems, plugging away, and developing tools that work and help us on our way in performing tasks and solving problems. When AI systems come up short against human beings, you get an even keener appreciation of the wonders of human intelligence (not easy to replicate or surpass). When AI systems succeed in pre-determined tasks, you can equally celebrate the wonders of the human intellect (capable of designing such systems). What could be more humanistic than that?

Submission by:

Dr Melvin Chen

Assistant Chair (Communications & Outreach)

Faculty Member (NTU-USP & Philosophy)

School of Humanities