纽约大学 EM 城市与不动产研究院（上海纽约大学，简称“ICREEM”）是一个专注于新兴市场中的城市和不动产领域的教育和研究中心。研究院与纽约大学专业研究学院下属的沙克不动产产研究院和帝势酒店管理中心合作，致力于为中外学生以及从业者提供前沿的不动产学位教育和专业研修项目。不仅如此，研究院也将侧重于对城市与不动产领域相关课题进行创新性、跨学科学术研究，其研究成果又将反哺我们的教育项目。研究院位于上海市浦东新区前滩区域，这是这座城市最具活力的城区之一，研究院的学生们将能够在全球最大的新兴不动产市场之一——中国，接触前沿的真实行业案例，并与当地不动产专业人士沟通交流。
Research
Our research draws on philosophy (from both the ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions), media theory, the history of science and computation broadly conceived, cultural and artistic practice, as well as empirical research and production. We aim to think widely across cultures and disciplines. Our work revolves around the following clusters:
AI & Urban Nature
This cluster interrogates the conceptual pairing of nature and artifice, in order to critically challenge contemporary anxieties around the artificial. We work in partnership with a cross-campus research initiative on urban nature that takes the garden with its multiple histories and cultures as a site of experimentation. By examining the animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman intelligences (plants, animals, soil, water, rock as well as machines), we investigate the past and future ecologies that together constitute the immersive, inorganic life of the sentient city.
AI & Religion
While popular culture sensationalizes AI, associating it with eschatology or fantasies of a digital afterlife, many more nuanced intersections of AI with religion and theology remain under-theorized. We posit that religion, spirituality, and theology have been, for centuries, spaces where humans have thought about the nonhuman, the boundaries of our will and agency, the questions of the real and illusory, of how to live a good life, and other subjects that have since been relegated to philosophy and science. We want to reanimate these traditions in our focus on contemplating the various ways AI, as both an applied technology and a speculative concept, intersects with religious thought and practice, spanning the spectrum from Buddhist metaphysics to the theological convictions of Catholic nuns.
Open AI
Despite the leading AI company today being named 'OpenAI', suggesting a connection to open software traditions, the field of artificial intelligence is predominantly controlled by closed organizations. From training practices to software accessibility, everything is walled off or shrouded in secrecy. Moreover, the training itself often follows specific political and cultural paradigms, leading to a homogenization of AI's cultural outputs. We see this as an ethical issue and aim to research and endorse the potential for a genuinely open approach to AI, which makes use of truly open-source methodologies, both in theory and practice.
AI outside the West
In every aspect of our work, the Center endeavors to make the most of its special situation as a Sino-American university located in Shanghai. This cluster will pay particular attention to theorizing AI outside the dominant paradigms of Western Europe and North America. The intellectual history of computation often focuses on the West, with no exception for AI. Thought experiments such as the Turing Test are not only foundational to the actual development of AI, like mimicking language production, but also serve as conceptual guidelines. What if we unearth a different history of synthetic intelligence and produce new thought experiments? From somatic computing in East Asia to post-Soviet cybernetics, we are interested in amplifying the recent scholarly effort towards a more expanded historiography of ideas, and to a new internationalism that considers a far wider range of intellectual inputs into the the trajectories of AI.