ECHO is a research lab at DTU Management. We combine artificial intelligence with qualitative and participatory methods to better understand how people experience, envision and contest the technologies that shape their lives.
In a democracy, technology entails choices and debate about what problems to solve, how, and for whom. A technological innovation that offers solutions for some will cause problems for others. From health tech to food systems, from renewable energy to urban planning, from climate adaptation to digital public services: actors with different stakes and different values will always have different perspectives and expectations, ask different questions, and bring different experiences to the table.
How do we know who they are? How can we best understand their concerns? How do we engage them in qualified deliberations about future technological directions? How do we generate such insights at scale and in time to make a difference? And how can we ensure that they inform decision-making?
The concerns that really matter to people are often hard to measure and therefore hard to make count when decisions are being made. They shift dynamically and are expressed in charged, online information environments where genuine disagreement and expert uncertainties mix with disinformation and algorithmically inflated hype. To ensure that democratically responsible technology development is robustly qualified, ongoing empirical investigations, new tools and methodological innovations are needed.
ECHOlab brings social scientists at the forefront of research on the ethical, political, and sociocultural dimensions of technology together with methodological experts driving the computational paradigm shift in big qualitative analysis. Our unique position within a technical university grants us access to deep technical knowledge and broader collaborations across the innovation spectrum. Read more about our people
Artificial intelligence is currently reshaping qualitative research. The transformation spans social scientific disciplines — from anthropology and sociology to psychology, organization studies, urban planning and STS — fundamentally changing how we can explore and engage with human experiences and the role of technology in society.
In the ECHOlab, we develop these new methodological potentials and conduct basic methodological research to support their scientific validity.
In the Observatory for Technological Questions in Society, we leverage LLMs and other forms of NLP to parse and map public debates about technology. The ability to continuously semi-automatically monitor how issues emerge, how actors raise alerts, how different types of critique are mobilized, and how controversies enter different phases, allow us to focus our guided qualitative deep dives on significant moments of change and contestation.
In the working group for Perspectival Modelling and Deep Digital Twins, we explore the value biases of LLMs and their potentials for modelling personas and generating synthetic interlocutors based on qualitative insights. We experiment with ways of steering and benchmarking model values, integrating practices like participatory reinforcement learning with ethnographic fieldwork, and ultimately bring deep qualitative insights into agent-based modelling and other forms of simulation.
Finally, in the working group for Gamification, Elicitation and Public Engagement, we use data physicalization and game design to bring our analyses into conversation with relevant stakeholders, elicit feedback, organize deliberation, and find new ways to do public engagement around emergent technological problems in society.