Brain-storming across all disciplines

“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club” — London is probably right, but for now I prepare myself with procrastination.

Imagine you have a very big, really hard problem to solve. You could work on it alone, ask friends for help, hire a consulting company, or you try the following:

  1. take 1000 people from all over the world, all of them are highly motivated, dedicated and have expertise in very different fields,
  2. bring them to one location,
  3. let them discuss, brain-storm, mingle, and work for 11 days to come up with novel, game-changing solutions,
  4. pick the best solution.

This is roughly the idea how the Unleash Lab is organized, a large workshop with the aim to find new solutions to help to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Does that really work? Well, I have no idea, but I’m going to figure it out soon! I’m very excited that I got the chance participate at the Unleash Lab next month.

What are my expectations to this? Obviously we will not find the magic solution that solves all problems. However, the chances that radically new solutions emerge are probably higher than at any other event. Having people with so many different experiences, opinions, education and cultures in one room working at same overarching problem will almost certainly lead to very creative ideas. The broad diversity of the participants is what makes the Unleash Lab very special for me.

At my work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology I experience every day how valuable the exchange with experts from different fields is. I’m a statistician by training and my mathematical expertise is rather useless by itself. However, in collaboration with domain experts, I’m often able to provide an alternative view or different approaches to real (or academic) problems.

Such interdisciplinary exchange gave me the possibility to learn about and contribute to various exciting problems. For example estimating the lifespan of buried infrastructures, calculating drug consumption based on wastewater samples, generation of new sanitation systems, uncertainty estimations, hydrological modeling, data assimilation for low-cost rain sensors, analysis of genomics data, modeling how faeces degrade in sewers, machine learning based weather radar forecasting, and so on.

The most important lesson I’ve learned from interdisciplinary work is this: Of course you have to know your math well, but the motivation to communicate across the domain borders is key. Finding a common language can be a time-consuming, and sometimes even frustrating process, but is always a very rewarding experience for both sides and leads often to new insights.

I’m looking very much forward to a lot of exciting discussions across all domains at the Unleash Lab!


PS: What is my idea to discuss during the Unleash Lab? I’m thinking about how mathematicians, computer scientists, and the like can find meaningful projects to volunteer with their skills. I’ll elaborate on that soon in another post.

PPS: In case you are interested in my research, please see my profile on Research Gate.

UNLEASH Lab

Global innovation lab creating disruptive solutions for the UN's SDGs

Andreas Scheidegger

Written by

Statistician / data scientist trying to solve meaningful problems

UNLEASH Lab

Global innovation lab creating disruptive solutions for the UN's SDGs

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