The System Design and Management program (SDM) has announced that Professor Thomas P. Hughes of the University of Pennsylvania will speak on "Open System Building: Boston Central Artery/Tunnel" on Friday, Oct. 30 at 4pm in Rm 9-057 (the LiNC Room).
This is his second public lecture in the program's annual Distinguished Lectures Series on Complex Systems. Seating is limited, but the presentation will be shown on MIT cable TV.
Professor Hughes is the Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Science at Penn. In his most recent book, Rescuing Prometheus, he presents a radically different view of the accomplishments of four large systems projects, including Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel and ARPANET, the original information superhighway created by the Defense Department.
Professor Hughes believes that the emphasis on systems thinking in these kinds of projects has transformed approaches to large-scale problems by marshaling technological and human resources in ways never imagined just a few decades ago.
SDM is MIT's first degree-granting program offered primarily at a distance. SDM enrolls high-potential engineering professionals from several of the nation's leading corporations. Now three years old, the program draws on faculty expertise in a wide range of fields.
Offered jointly by the School of Engineering and the Sloan School of Management, SDM permits students to complete a Master of Science in Engineering and Management in either a 13-month on-campus option or a 24-month hybrid on-campus/off-campus option that makes heavy use of videoconferencing and web-based instruction linked to work sites around the country.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 21, 1998.
