Magnus Egerstedt talks about his priorities

A new provost is coming to town. Magnus Egerstedt is a native of Sweden, plays soccer and the drums, and programs swarms of little robots to jiggle and bounce into place to form letters, most recently U-N-C.

“I don’t like being an abstraction. I like to be present,” said Egerstedt, whose first day at UNC-Chapel Hill is March 2. “One of my ambitions is that people should know not only who their provost is, but what a provost does. I am planning to be out there as a real presence on campus. When you see me, stop me and say hi, and tell me what’s on your mind.”

Egerstedt recently sat down with The Well to talk about his research and his priorities as provost.

What aspect of your current research are you most excited about?

As a kid, I was mesmerized by schooling fish or flocking birds. I’ve been working on swarm robotics, teams of robots, figuring out the algorithms that let them do beautiful and interesting and useful things. The idea of connecting to nature is a theme in my research. Recently, I have started working on something I call robot ecology — taking an ecological perspective of robots as organisms, deeply coupled to their environments. I predict that this is going to become its own scientific field in 10 years or so.

Will you continue to do research and teach here at UNC-Chapel Hill?

I certainly hope so. I think it’s important when you are a leader on an academic campus that you maintain a toehold in the core mission, which is research and teaching. No matter what title I have on my business card, the one I’m the most proud of is professor, and I want to make sure I continue to earn that title.

What attracted you to the position of provost at Carolina?

The combination of excellence, ambition, hunger and strong brand, with a remarkable connection between the University and its alumni and the state — this is a platform where impactful things can be done. The irony isn’t lost on me that a university that allows us to look to the future is the oldest public university in the nation.

What do you see as the University’s strengths and opportunities for improvement?

Excellence is one obvious strength. Then the brand is crazy strong. I do a fair bit of international travel, and it doesn’t matter where I am, if it’s Baltimore or Beijing, someone will walk by with a Tar Heel baseball cap, and that’s another real strength.

Here’s an opportunity that I’m looking forward to: digging into the processes on campus. Every university can do better in terms of the processes. It’s not glamorous, but it really helps. One way I would like to be evaluated as provost is in terms of time: How much time do I free up for our staff, our faculty and our students so they can spend their time productively?

You have named artificial intelligence, engineering and enrollment growth as some of your priorities. How will you achieve your goals?

Let’s start with enrollment growth. We need to keep up with North Carolina’s population growth and the state’s workforce needs to stay true to our mission as serving the state. And we need to be growing with purpose. That will involve infrastructure. It will involve technology. It will involve human capital. We can’t just add students without making sure we have the instructors to engage and interact with them.

I’m going to lump AI and engineering together. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing history or chemistry or journalism, AI is going to be part of that. We need to make sure that we graduate students who are fluent in AI. We need to use AI effectively in our research and make sure we have a comprehensive AI strategy. I see engineering as an addition, or a complement, to the things we already do well, combining it with health enterprise, data science, environmental science, or applied science, like physics and chemistry.

Development at Carolina North is a key University priority. What opportunities do you see there?

Carolina North is an amazing opportunity for this campus. It will allow us to scale out and have the physical structure grow as the student population is growing. It’s almost unheard of for an established university to be presented with a blank canvas, where one can imagine multidisciplinary and translational research, and a much more nimble and fluid arrangement of disciplines and structures to do new things. It’s also going to be part of the community. We’re preserving the green space and addressing affordable housing issues for our students, staff and the community.

The new School of Data and Information Sciences will incorporate the schools of Data Science and Society and Information and Library Science. What are your goals for the school?

I’m very excited about the creation of this new school. Every university on the planet right now is struggling with how AI and data science fit. The new school, with two founding members, allows us to really start envisioning what the pieces of this emerging new discipline should look like, especially as it integrates with information and library sciences. It’s an amazingly good start. Because of Carolina’s national prominence, if we get this right, people will point to us and say, “That’s how you do it.”

How will you prepare students for the jobs of the future, especially regarding AI?

I always come back to three main ingredients. One is solid foundations in whatever discipline you’re studying. Two is problem-solving, not just teaching our students to regurgitate what they’re being told. And three is creativity. With those three components — and let’s sprinkle in some prompt engineering while we’re at it — we can future-proof our students. Because the reality is they are going to define what the work of the future is going to look like.