Reflections

The scariest place: Temple University Japan (TUJ) Cafeteria

By Marvin Starominski-Uehara, October 31st, 2024

Yes, you read it right. TUJ cafeteria is a scary place, a very scary one. It is so scary because it is not ordinary. It is not even unique since places like this are not supposed to exist. TUJ Cafeteria is a place where 99.99% of the world population have never experienced or can even image exist. You step in there and instantly feel out of place, something weird going on. On any given day, you will find in this cafeteria around two hundred college students from more than eighty countries and over a hundred different regions of the world casually walking around and having a good time with people who are, theoretically, so different from them. How is it possible that so many young adults from all these corners of the world can hang out together as if it is the most common thing to do, day in, day out?

Well, it might help to mention that in this environment, everyone has a very good command of verbal communication in English. I would also guess that more than half of those people bonding in this cafeteria are bilingual, and a third of them can speak multiple languages. Okay, you might be thinking now that all those young adults are a bunch of privileged individuals coming from elite education systems around the globe. I cannot deny that. Among these foreign students, there are children of political and business leaders who relocated to Tokyo. There are also many non-native English speakers whose parents invested heavily in international education for their children from a very young age. So, you might argue that this cafeteria is not representative of the global population because of the economic disparities within and between countries and regions. This is a fair point! I live in Miyazaki, one of the poorest prefectures in Japan (by Japanese standards), and I have yet to meet a student in my TUJ classes who was born and raised here.

But that is just the face value of the ‘scary’ diversity you feel when you are in this cafeteria. In this environment, there are also a number of students who come from low-income single-parent households. You will come across many students who decided to bet on themselves and take out loans to invest in their future. You will listen to many stories of personal struggles from students coming from marginalized, minority, and persecuted groups. These are real testimonials of resilience and perseverance, and they are not uncommon to be shared over casual conversations. So, there are many other elements, beyond the financial and economic ones, that explain the mix of people enjoying themselves in the TUJ Cafeteria. But this more nuanced understanding of this diverse community does not alleviate the anxiety one will certainly feel when being there for the very first time. It might even add more stress to those operating under expected rigid norms and attitudes. Like I said, TUJ Cafeteria is a scary place, a very scary one.

TUJ Cafeteria is scary because it is not what the world is but what it should be. Most parents would be totally overwhelmed stepping into this cafeteria. They would have little to no clue of what is happening in this environment. How can so many different looks, different clothes, different genders, different colors, different languages, and struggles co-exist? How is that even possible? This is not how 99.99% of the parents around the globe, including myself, grew up. This is not what we were told. This is far removed from what we have ever experienced and even imagined in our wildest dreams of diversity or just enjoying a glamorous cosmopolitan lifestyle. But here is the flip side: most of these same parents, like me, would be incredibly proud to see their children confidently navigating a world that values people for who they truly are, what they say, and how they act with respect and empathy toward everyone around them, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized. Sure, culture, physical traits, beliefs, and nationalities all shape who we are, what we believe, how we connect, and what we can dream of. But these institutional labels that are supposedly meant to help us feel more comfortable while growing into a predictable world of rules and customs are unceremoniously left behind the doors of those entering into TUJ Cafeteria. And for many of us, being stripped of what we have believed and experienced throughout our lives is quite unnerving. AT TUJ Cafeteria, 99.99% of the world population is asked to be naked. How much money you or your family have does not matter. What does matter, and what really helps you navigate diversity with confidence and make the most of it, is how proactive you can be, how willing you are to listen and learn, to compromise, to turn ideas into actions that help communities beyond those doors become less divided and more united. TUJ Cafeteria is indeed a very scary place, a place where dreams are never too scary to be dreamed of and achieved. And as a student of mine recently said in class: ‘Experiencing diversity can change the trajectory of your life. It really can!’

The Origins of the Stigmergy Network Theory

In my mid-twenties, after returning home from work, the janitor of the building complex I lived in asked me to call the police immediately as my mother had just been run over and was in hospital. After some frantic searches around public hospitals, I found her and learned she was clinically fine, but the shock of this experience led me to visit days later the exact location where she was hit by a motorcycle early evening. From this informal ‘inspection’ and conversations with residents and business owners, I learned that road accidents involving pedestrians occurred frequently at this intersection; however, no structural measures had been taken to mitigate these known risks. This experience then left me wondering i) What if I could share the risks, and evidence, of this intersection with a large audience in an easy, safe, and trusted way? What if I could learn what had happened before and monitor the structural and nonstructural measures taken by local officials -- and residents -- to mitigate these risks? How about creating something like this SenseCityVity project?

Ten years later, a toddler in Queensland died after being neglected and abused. That piece of news ‘hit me’ very hard as I had just become a father the year before. Pondering on what I could do to help this vulnerable group, as well as caretakers, I put together a research proposal to develop a mobile application that would collect ‘perceived risk inputs’ and provide, as a ‘weighted probabilistic output’, a set of recommendations for prevention and early intervention. Unfortunately, I have never had a chance to pursue this project titled: ‘Reducing the Cost Error of False Risks with Artificial Intelligence’. The main takeaway from this unrealized project was leading my curiosity to the field -- and potentials -- of artificial intelligence in the context of Error Management Theory so that I could incorporate those learnings into my future research projects.

I wrote the research proposal on child maltreatment because around that same time I was looking into the inherent and residual risks associated with the 2010/2011 Queensland Floods for my doctoral thesis. During my initial investigations on the early signs of this evolving risk, I came across a post shared in a forum from a concerned citizen urging residents living downstream the Brisbane River to evacuate due to the imminent water release from the Wivenhoe Dam. I became particularly interested in this message as it was uploaded days before the release of the official warning by authorities. As the underlying themes of my dissertation were risk perception and decision making, I could not stop wondering whether the number of deaths and missing victims would have been different, despite hindsight bias and related ‘behavioral traps’, had this post reached the people it needed to. How could this online forum have ensured that such an individual is reputable and trustworthy? How could this individual increase the trustworthiness of the piece of information he/she was sharing online? How could at-risk communities be informed about an emerging threat by an outlier? How could such an outlier be ‘intelligently’ validated through an automated classification and ranking system? This set of questions led me to explore the possibilities that heuristics, or rules of thumb, and networks create for informing individual risk perception and shaping decision making under uncertainty, which I later included in my thesis and served for my assessment on the role of eyewitnesses in spurring collective action during the COVID-19 pandemic titled: ‘Powering Social Media: Simple Guide for the Most Vulnerable to Make Emergencies Visible’.

Towards the end of my doctorate, and due to my growing interest in finding ways to efficiently collect and ‘intelligently’ rectify and validate individual risk perception for decision making, I audited ‘statistics’, ‘machine learning’, ‘algorithms’, and ‘artificial intelligence’ courses at the University of Queensland (UQ). Around that time, I was looking for a suitable location to test the hypotheses and limitations of the ideas I had in mind. After consulting with machine learning scholars in the U.S., I thought about designing a supervised machine learning application to help border agents detect high-risk travelers (note: I clearly understand such a project falls into the type of ‘social profiling’ and can further heighten social inequalities and indiscriminately target the most vulnerable, which is the reason why the European Union and many countries banned this type of artificial intelligence projects. However, my intent with this project is to further investigate not only the potentials but also the limits and risks of breakthrough discoveries and disruptive technology and how, I believe, they intersect with my specific research interests. The title of this proposal is ‘Detecting High Risk Threats and Improving Border Cross Experience with Machine Learning’.)

After the submission of my dissertation, UQ awarded me further scholarship to stay in Australia for another year, which made me the first UQ graduate student to be awarded with the Career Development Scholarship, so that I could continue pursuing alternative avenues to build bridges between the market and academia. I then joined UQ Ventures and, together with a doctoral candidate in the School of Engineering, co-founded a startup to help online marketplaces classify and rank reviews using Natural Language Processing to offer a better experience to their users. This enterprise attracted the attention of many engineering students from different programs across Queensland as well as CSIRO, which selected us as the first UQ startup to join their ON Prime accelerator program. CSIRO awarded us further monetary support after our team excelled in incorporating the design thinking principles, they had equipped us with, into testing and validating our ‘Minimum Viable Product’, or simple prototype. In the meantime, I had the privilege to meet many key stakeholders in the startup community in Brisbane and Sydney, including angel investors, venture capitalists, and decision makers like the then NSW’s Minister for Innovation, Science and Technology, the honorary Member of Parliament Matthew Kean. Unfortunately, this endeavor came to an abrupt ending when my co-founder and I realized that the timeline for funding this enterprise was not aligned with our family financial obligations once our scholarships expired. Nevertheless, the lessons from this transformational experience taught, and instilled in, me valuable soft skills, which I have since then applied in developing my project-, inquiry-based classes, as well as the way I approach and collaborate with my colleagues.

Finally, during the summer break of the Olympics in Tokyo, I spent most of my time sitting in a coffee shop trying to figure out whether there were any patterns that would help me explain and understand some of the most relevant and global political events occurring at that time. During this inquiry, I came across the work of Francis Heylighen and the provocative, and somewhat radical, book ‘Binding Chaos’ of Heather Marsh. Many of their research and propositions were quite original but it was the concept of ‘stigmergy’, which I had never heard of, that caught my attention. I then decided to conduct my own research on what stigmergy entailed and whether it would help me understand and, at least, explain some of the complexities I was witnessing around the globe. The more I explored the fundamentals of this ‘indirect coordination by autonomous agents in a mediated environment’, the more it helped me evaluate some of the contemporary social and political phenomena around me from a different and novel perspective. I have then started questioning whether it would be possible to replicate the autonomous and exploratory acts of ‘ants and termites’ on building and maintaining highly complex evolving systems by quickly responding and recovering from unexpected and massive environmental disturbances. This is when my epistemological -- and ontological -- interest for ‘human stigmergy’ was born and I became increasingly determined to explore its possibilities -- and limitations -- in explaining, predicting, and transforming our risk societies into resilient ones. The result of this inquiry led me to design the fundamentals of the ‘Stigmergy Network Theory’.