Scientific Work

* For all scientific publications, see Google Scholar & scientific resume.

Iyad Rahwan’s overarching goal is to help humanity thrive in the age of AI. His early scientific work explored how social media accelerated time-critical social mobilization—enabling unprecedented feats, such as searching an entire continent in 9 hours, or re-assembling shredded documents. He led the winning team in the US State Department's Tag Challenge, using social media to locate individuals in remote cities within 12 hours using only their mug shots.

Rahwan’s subsequent work focused on the socio-economic and ethical challenges and opportunities posed by AI technology. He led the Moral Machine project, which crowdsourced 100 million decisions from people worldwide about the ethics of autonomous vehicles.

Most recently, Rahwan promotes the science fiction science method: anticipating the impact of technology on humans by turning science fiction scenarios into behavioral experiments. To this end, he promotes the science of machine behavior, and its impact on human behavior, including human morality and human-machine cooperation. He demonstrated the world's first human-level strategic cooperation by an AI, and innovated new methods to anticipate the potential impact of AI on human labor. He explores how AI impacts human culture and creativity, and is spearheading the study of machine culture: culture generated or mediated by machines.