Refining a Novel AI Restaurant Recommender Application: A Systems Approach to Increasing User Engagement and Retention; A Utilitarian Analysis of Boeing’s Negligence in the 787 Dreamliner’s Development

My technical project and STS research paper are connected through the theme that technology must be developed with awareness of its broader social impact. I explore this theme through two distinct but related projects. My technical project focuses on the development of a personalized AI restaurant recommendation system that aims to remove the biases in restaurant reviews with suggestions that are tailored to each user’s taste preferences. My STS research paper analyzes the unethical engineering decisions made by Boeing that led to negative economic and safety consequences for the public. While my technical work and STS research project approach the issue from different subjects, they both highlight how technological development can either help or hurt society and the importance of making ethically grounded decisions. For my technical project, my capstone team worked as consultants for a startup building the mobile application dinemait, an AI-powered system designed to provide users with personalized and unbiased restaurant recommendations. Unlike the existing review platforms that suffer from popularity and confirmation bias due to their filtering algorithms, dinemait removes the influence of external ratings. Their two core features, DineMate and TasteGraph, interpret natural language queries and synthesize user taste profiles to generate unbiased, accurate and relevant recommendations. The suggestions are based on individual preferences rather than public reviews; thus, the app is able to provide a trustworthy and user-centric restaurant search tool that improves the decision-making process in everyday dining. My STS research paper also explores how technology can affect society, but through a different lens. My research examines what happens when technology is developed without fully considering ethical or societal risks. I analyze the case of the battery fires on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner that demonstrates how a prioritization of specific values during the design and development process can lead to unintended negative outcomes. Using Jeremy Bentham’s ethical framework of utilitarianism to evaluate the consequences of Boeing’s decisions, I argue that Boeing acted unethically in their decision-making process as it resulted in negative consequences for the company, its stakeholders, and the public. My paper explores this idea and how the societal impacts of technologies in high-stakes industries must be taken into consideration as they can have wide-spread impacts. The goal of my research is to encourage a more ethically informed approach to engineering design and decision-making. While dinemait and the Boeing 787 are very different projects, working on and researching both of them has offered valuable insights for my future work. The case study highlighted the importance of ethical consideration in technological development, showing that decisions have large societal consequences. As I move forward in my professional work, I will ensure that I prioritize an approach that not only considers technical feasibility but also assesses potential impacts to society. This means actively identifying and mitigating biases, understanding stakeholder needs and concerns, and incorporating ethical decision making into the design process. By doing so, I hope to ensure that my future projects are developed both innovatively and socially responsible.