Photo by Tony Rinaldo

“Science is exploding so quickly. You have to work deeply enough to make contributions to your field, but you also have to be informed enough about other disciplines that you don’t repeat and reinvent.

“There are very few funded opportunities at Harvard to bring scholars together from different fields, and these collaborations are especially valuable for junior faculty members. In the Exploratory Seminar I led with Jerry Green [the John Leverett Professor and David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy in Harvard’s Department of Economics], we invited people from computer science, artificial intelligence, and microeconomic theory who think about preferences.

“Economists and psychologists study the difference between people’s preferences revealed through behavior and their stated preferences. Any divergence between revealed and latent preferences is very interesting to people working in artificial intelligence. If I’m building computer systems that make decisions on your behalf, should I make them on the basis of your latent or revealed preferences?”

David C. Parkes is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. His research interests include electronic commerce, game theory, and social computing.

Since 2004, Parkes has collaborated with Harvard colleagues to lead three Exploratory Seminars at Radcliffe. He was also a member of the planning committee for the Institute’s 2009 symposium “Improving Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Lessons from the Natural and Social Sciences.”

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