It’s hard to place Arthur Paul Pedersen in a single category. His interests are broad – from game theory, artificial intelligence, logic, and art authentication, to name a few, though he doesn’t necessarily separate these subjects from one another. He is continuing his multidisciplinary vision at City College.
Pedersen is one of Grove School of Engineering’s new tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer Science. He joined City College in 2019 as an adjunct professor, teaching courses for the M.S. programs in Cybersecurity and Data Science & Engineering, in addition to teaching Ph.D. and M.S level computer and data science courses at the CUNY Graduate Center. He later became a research scientist at the CUNY CREST Institute.
“I started college, thinking I was going to make films and go into creative writing or something like that. I was pursuing that, and then I became interested in philosophy. That’s how I got more interested in math (and reasoning).You learn about what Aristotle had to say, or some, you know, you in what Freud had to say, and then you use their mind, their framework, in order to analyze. So I was more interested [in] where this framework comes from.”
Pedersen holds 2 bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as an M.S. and Ph.D. in logic, computation, and methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. After graduating, he left the U.S. to pursue research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, studying the logistics of reasoning and decision making.
Last year, he published a critical essay, “Discourse on measurement,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where he warns of a trend toward measurement illiteracy in the science and public policy sectors and argues for reform.
At CUNY, in partnership with Syracuse University, he founded the Intel Investigations Lab (stylized as i2Lab) with Syracuse professor and former CIA analyst Kristen Patel. He plans to analyze malware with faculty and provide internships to students. Previously, Pedersen served as an advisor to the LMI group, which made headlines for its efforts in identifying a previously unknown Vincent Van Gogh painting. At the i2Lab, he is investigating antiquities looting in South(east) Asia, continuing his work in art authentication and handwriting analysis.
This spring, Pedersen will teach Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT): Investigations Practicum, a graduate experimental course. Students will examine advanced search strategies, data quality principles, and automation techniques applicable to professions such as intelligence and journalism.
“I want my students to find what they like about what they’re learning,” he said. “So very often, especially in abstract courses like theoretical computer science, students come in like they know that. You know, automata, Turing machines are important for computation, but they still don’t care. Throughout the semester… I actively encourage students to try to connect to their interests.”
Mia Euceda is an alumna of Baruch College, where they studied journalism and served as an editor for The Ticker newspaper and Refract Magazine. Their work has been published in The New York Review of Books and Treble Zine.