In one of my courses, Interdisciplinary Futures, I participated in a special group project that allowed me to experience the process of collaboration from an interdisciplinary perspective. This experience was very meaningful for me because it gave me the opportunity to work with students from different professional backgrounds. This diverse team structure allowed me to gain a deep appreciation for the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and how different expertise can collide to create a spark of innovation. During the course of the project, I was required to apply the theories and methods I learned in the course. This not only helped me consolidate my knowledge, but also helped me understand how to communicate and collaborate efficiently in an interdisciplinary team. At the beginning of the project, we encountered some challenges, such as inconsistent understanding of the problem and differences in methodology, but through many discussions and mutual learning, we managed to find a solution that incorporated each other’s perspectives.
Interdisciplinary study means the ability to develop and apply knowledge and skills from across different disciplines and is crucial to addressing many current complex challenges and planetary-scale issues.
—University of Edinburgh
For instance, the team project we did was to create an AI tool to detect the trustworthy of AI generated work. Our group have five people but from various backgrounds, such as Future Governance, Data Inequality and Creative Industires. At the initial stage, our group members got together to exchange our disciplinary backgrounds, and during the conversation we realized that the most significant challenges in the current digital era is Generative AI. Therefore, we have the idea to create a detective tool for improving the trustworthy and reliance of AI usage thereby increasing users’ confidences. My teammates really inspired me to discover different cultural context from multiple disciplinaries, they would bring the advanced news and information related AI, and also link our project to various scenario like presidential election and the environmental governance, which are something I didn’t pay attention to or know about before. Additionally, this intersiciplinary teamwork also enable me to dive into my own major. During the process of work creation, I have understood deeply about the benefits and disadvantage of Generative AI in Creative Industries, especially within the sphere of Intellectual Property. With the development of AI techonology, despite AI could assist in improving the productivity, there are confusions between the AI created works and human produced works, in which the issues of copyright would be raised.
After this project, I realized that interdisciplinary research goes both ways. As I am learning about other disciplines, I am also learning more about my own major through feedback from students from other backgrounds, resulting in a deeper understanding and appreciation.
Leave a Reply