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  1. Dec 2020
    1. Much like civil engineering and chemical engineering in decades past, this new discipline aims to corral the power of a few key ideas, bringing new resources and capabilities to people, and doing so safely. Whereas civil engineering and chemical engineering were built on physics and chemistry, this new engineering discipline will be built on ideas that the preceding century gave substance to — ideas such as “information,” “algorithm,” “data,” “uncertainty,” “computing,” “inference,” and “optimization.” Moreover, since much of the focus of the new discipline will be on data from and about humans, its development will require perspectives from the social sciences and humanities.

      Michael Jordan draws the analogy with the emergence of civil and chemical engineering, building with the building blocks of the century prior: physics and chemistry. In this case the building blocks are ideas such as: information, algorithm, data, uncertainty, computing, inference and optimization.