The Era of
Interdisciplinary
and
Socio-technical
AI
Dr.-Ing. Mennatullah Hendawy
Center for Advanced Internet Studies Technical University of Munich Germany
“ What if I told you your ability to combine unrelated ideas will determine your success in an AI-driven world
Quote by Ben Arnon
Agenda
What is Interdisciplinarity and What is Socio-technical?
Building up to Interdisciplinary and Socio-technical AI Projects
Examples of Interdisciplinary and Socio-technical AI Projects
Connecting the dots
Background
Interdisciplinary (urban) Planner/ Designer
IGCSE
(Cambridge University, UK) Math +Business +Psychology
BSc. Architectural Engineering (Ain Shams Uni, Egypt)
Urban planning + design
Msc. Integrated Urbanism & Sustainble design (Stuttgart Uni + Ain Shams uni - Germany / Egypt) Urban policies
Phd Planning Building Enviroment (TU Berlin, Germany)
Urban studies + media studies
Postdoc
UMass Amherst - HCI VIS Lab, USA University of California Santa Cruz, USA
Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Germany Impact Circles e.V.
Urban studies + computer science
(smart cities, urban AI, AI ethics, Serious Games, AI for Child online Safety)
Habilitation
Technical University of Munich, Germany Collective Urban Intelligence
What is Interdisciplinarity?
McPhee, C., Bliemel, M. and van der Bijl-Brouwer, M., 2018. Editorial: Transdisciplinary Innovation (August 2018). Technology Innovation Management Review, 8 (8): 3-6 [online]
AI as a Catalyst for Interdisciplinary Research
Velev, D. and Zlateva, P., 2023. Issues of artificial intelligence application in digital marketing. In Digitalization and Management Innovation II (pp. 52- 59). IOS Press.
Ragland, D.A. (2024) ‘Leveraging AI to propel interdisciplinary research’, Medium, 5 July.
Going Beyond the Technology
Whitworth, B. and Ahmad, A. (2014) ‘Socio-Technical System Design’, in Löwgren, J. et al. (eds) The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (2nd ed.). Interaction Design Foundation. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer- interaction-2nd-ed/socio-technical-system-design (Accessed: 29 January 2026).
What is Socio-Technical?
Geraghty, T. (2023) ‘Sociotechnical Theory’. Psych Safety, 9 June. Available at: https://psychsafety.com/sociotechnical-theory/
Gao, T.P., Su, H. and Yu, T., 2021. The Connotation and Logical Construction of Government Digital Transformation--Based on the Analysis of Sociotechnical System Theory. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 251, p. 03069). EDP Sciences.
Socio-Technical AI
Xu, W. and Gao, Z., 2024. An intelligent sociotechnical systems (iSTS) framework: Enabling a hierarchical human-centered AI (hHCAI) approach. IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society.
Rohde, F., Wagner, J., Meyer, A., Reinhard, P., Voss, M., Petschow, U. and Mollen, A., 2023. Broadening the perspective for sustainable AI: Comprehensive sustainability criteria and indicators for AI systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.13686.
Building up to Interdisciplinary and
Socio-technical AI
Starting My Journey Towards AI
In the current globalized/mediatized age, the popular media’s image of the city hardly represents the majority of citizens’ everyday city experiences or perceptions of their future.
This misrepresentation of urban conditions in media on one side creates processes of visibility and invisibility for the city among not only the general public but also urban
planners who get enrolled in the
process of producing these city/ies (images).
On the other side, this effects and
facilitates
disablement
injustices and
as well the
further
marginalization, as socio-spatial
exclusion of
vulnerable groups from services and infrastructure.
In | Egypt, | these | vulnerable groups |
form | the | majority | of the population. |
In this thesis, this is suggested to be termed as ‘Spatio-visual co-constructions’.
Selected Postdoc projects
Informative cartographic communica-
tion
Hybrid citizenship in Smart Cities
Data Visualization of Berlin’s housing
Serious games for climate action
Serious games for
Energy poverty
Digital Democratic Innovation
Smart Cities
Examples of Interdisciplinary and
Socio-technical AI Projects
MOOC on Urban AI
in Africa
Cairo Urban AI
Charter
AI Policy
Setting an Agenda
for Urban AI
Adaptivity in
Urban Planning
andSetting an
Agenda for Urban
AI Adaptivity in
Urban Planning
andArchitecture
An Inventory of AI
ethics: Analyzing
100 documents
A starting frame-
work for urban AI
applications
AI for Child Online
Safety
The Digital Co-Agency Framework. and the Values of Digital Co-Agency-Based Systems
Ethics of AI for
earth observation
Multidisciplinary Approaches to AI Ethics in EO (Authors based on OpenAI ChatGpt, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot)
AI for Collective
Decision Making
Setting Directions
CONNECTING THE DOTS
„In the broadest sense, it will take a whole-of- society approach to
ensure that technological advances will align with the best interests of humans impacted by them“
Mitra, B., Cramer, H., Gurevich, O. (2025). Sociotechnical Implications of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Information Access. In: White, R.W., Shah, C. (eds) Information Access in the Era of Generative AI. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 51. Springer, Cham. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-031-73147-1_7
Xu, W. and Gao, Z., 2024. An intelligent sociotechnical systems (iSTS) framework: Enabling a hierarchical human-centered AI (hHCAI) approach. IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society
A sociotechnically-based hierarchical HCAI (hHCAI) approach
THANK YOU
Dr.-Ing. Mennatullah Hendawy
Center for Advanced Internet Studies Technical University of Munich Germany