Van spijkerschrift tot codetaal

AI requires the development of database systems that are able to process and analyze huge amounts of data in a fast and efficient way. CWI researchers play a pioneering role in the development of such database architectures, and have attracted international datawarehouse companies to Amsterdam.

One of those pioneers is Marcin Żukowski, who co-developed a database management systems that had great societal impact and is used by tech giants to this day. He is the co-founder of software company Snowflake, a Silicon Valley based company that offered the first cloud-based data warehousing service that is truly designed for the cloud. Snowflake uses vectorized query execution and lightweight compression methods in its columnar data storage, two techniques that were co-designed by Żukowski during his PhD years at CWI.

For this achievement Żukowski will receive the Dijkstra Fellowship on 21 November at CWI. This fellowship is awarded once in every five years by CWI. This day is also filled with lectures on the topic of the architecture of data processing and analysis systems.

Almost in every metropolitan city in the world exists a Chinatown where Chinese diasporic communities live and conduct commercial activities. In recent years, many countries have started listing and conserving Chinese diasporic heritage as their dynamic cultural resources that represent human migration histories and cultural diversity.

Chinese diasporic communities came to the Netherlands in the early 20th century. The Chinatown in Amsterdam is one of the main Chinatowns in the Netherlands, and is well-known in Europe. However, very few studies in the field of heritage management reveal and discuss the cultural significance (heritage attributes, values from various stakeholders) and management models.

We are researchers from the UNESCO chair in Heritage and Values, TU Delft. We are now looking for participants for a research project on Chinese diasporic heritage in the Netherlands, also called “共同保育我們的唐人街遺產” in Chinese. If you:
- come from a Chinese family with a migration background
- (used to) live in/work in/have emotional connections to Chinatown areas
- would like to share your stories/interests about Chinese diasporic heritage in the Dutch Context
......
Join us for this initiative for understanding, documenting and mapping the place where we all belong! You will be able to tell your own heritage, histories and stories, and encounter dynamic groups of heritage enthusiasts. Your participation will help us understand further the vibrant cultural legacy, which is valuable for keeping and telling future generations.

Feel free to fill in or share this participant form. We contact you and organize further activities (e.g. interview, focus group meeting, workshop, etc.) in the future.

For more information, you can also reach us through:
- Email: yan.zhou@tudelft.nl
- Tel: +31(0)647824405
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yan-zhou-45a79b290
_____________________________________________________________
Yan ZHOU (PhD researcher)
Dr. Ana PEREIRA RODERS (Professor)
Dr. Lidwine SPOORMANS (researcher & lecturer)
TU Delft – UNESCO Chair in Heritage and Values
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment 

During our 23rd Demo Day on April 18, 2024, Ruben Polderman told us more about the philosophy and method of Socratic Design. It's important for a city to collectively reflect on a good existence. Socratic Design can be a way to think about this together, collectively.
 
Thinking and Acting Differently with Socratic Design
Together with his colleagues at the Digitalization & Innovation department of the Municipality of Amsterdam, Ruben explored how a city should deal with innovation and digitalization. Things were progressing well. The municipality could act swiftly; for example, promising Smart Mobility research and innovation projects were initiated with new partners. However, the transitions are heading in various directions, and progress remains limited. No matter how groundbreaking innovation is, there's a danger in trying to solve problems with the same mindset that caused them. The ability to perceive or think differently is therefore crucial. More crucial, even, than accumulated knowledge, as filosopher David Bohm suggested.
 
Through Socratic Design, we can collectively improve the latter. You work on your own presuppositions, enhance your listening skills, and deepen your understanding of our current dominant narratives to create new narratives and practices. Ruben guided us through examples and exercises to help us understand what narratives and presuppositions entail.

Narratives
"We think we live in reality, but we live in a narrative," Ruben proposes to the group. What we say to each other and how we interact creates a culture that shapes the group and its actions. Narratives are stories that guide our culture, values, thoughts, and actions. They are paradigms so deeply rooted that we no longer question them and sometimes believe there is no alternative. Our current dominant narrative has significant consequences for the Earth and humanity, and although it seems fixed, we can also create new narratives together if we choose to do so.

We must fundamentally seek a good existence within safe ecological boundaries. This should go beyond the transitions we are currently favouring, which sustain our lifestyle but just make it less harmful for the environment. If we want to create new stories with new, positive human perceptions and lifestyles, we must first examine our current narrative and presuppositions. We will need to deconstruct our current ways of living and thinking, much like the Theory U method mentioned during the previous Knowledge Session (see our recap article of this session).
 
Understanding Presuppositions
Ruben showed us various themes and images to collectively practice recognizing presuppositions. For example, a photo of a medical patient and doctors in action demonstrates that our feeling of "to measure is to know" is also crucial in healthcare. The doctors focus on the screen, the graph, the numbers, and therefore have less focus on the patient; the human, themselves. A photo of the stock market, where a group of men is busy trading stocks, also illustrates our idea of economic growth. Here too, there is a fixation on numbers. Ideally, they're green and going up, but meanwhile, we can lose sight of what exactly we're working towards and what exactly it is that we’re ‘growing’.

As a group, we discussed some presuppositions we could find in our field of work. For example, we talked about our need for and appreciation of objective data, and technologism; the belief in solutions rooted in technology and digitalization.
 
Fundamental Presupposition Shifts and New Narratives
If you flip a presupposition like Technologism and suggest that Social Interaction could be our salvation and solution to many of our problems, you set off a fundamental presupposition shift. If you translate this into practical actions or experiments, you can collectively understand how a newly created presupposition functions. As a group, we worked on this. During this session, I myself worked with an example from the field of mobility.

If I were to apply this new presupposition in the field of mobility and we look at the development of cars, perhaps we shouldn't go towards autonomous vehicles (technologism), but look for ways to motivate and strengthen carpooling (social interaction). As an experiment, you could, for example, set up an alternative to the conventional car lease plan. Employees of an organization don't all get the option to lease a car; instead, it's considered who could commute together, and there's a maximum of 1 car for every 4 employees per organization. Just like going to an away game with your soccer team on Sundays as a kid; enjoyable!
 
Read More
This session was an introduction and gave us a good initial understanding of this philosophy and method, but there's much more to discover. The method also delves into how presuppositions are deeply rooted in us, how we validate this with feeling in our bodies, and dialogue methods to collectively arrive at new values and narratives. There's more explained about Socratic Design on Amsterdam's Open Research platform.