Work Package 4: Investigating and supporting collaboration across a diverse interdisciplinary research team

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WP4 is a social science led workstream within AI-MULTIPLY and is an embedded ethnographic study which explores how all the different people in the consortium work together in practice and how these ways of working inform the design of the artificial intelligence technology. The development of AI technologies involves not only technical processes, but social processes. Understanding how these social processes unfold is important, as the people in the collaboration bring different kinds of expertise, perspectives, knowledge and aspirations to the project. How these differences are negotiated in practice has important consequences for the models and technologies that are produced. Adopting a socio-technical orientation to technology design, this study will shed light on the everyday social processes of research practices.

 

This work packages explores:

 

  1. How different people in the project understand and value what they are doing
  2. What assumptions different people in the collaboration bring to the project
  3. How collaborators contribute to the project team
  4. How different kinds of knowledge and expertise are ‘worked through’ within the team.

 

Our main focus for data collection is the detailed observation of interdisciplinary project team meetings and in-depth interviews with researchers and public contributors. In parallel with the data gathering and analysis the WP4 team also facilitate regular reflexive workshops with the wider AI-MULTIPLY team, drawing the team’s attention to the ways in which collaboration is being done and inviting collective reflection on key lines of enquiry.

 

The overarching aim of WP4 is to understand how successful collaborations between people who have different fields of expertise can be achieved in the field of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare.