Peter Hirst, senior associate dean for executive education at MIT Sloan Executive Education, speaks with Arianne Cohen of Bloomberg about the lessons he’s learned from managing a hybrid team of staff members who worked both remotely and in the office. Hirst advises supervisors to manage by “defining outcomes—coaching people, giving them tools and resources, and really trusting people to get their work done.”
Writing for Fortune, graduate student Nina McMurry examines how public health authorities can allay fears about contact tracing apps. “Public health authorities need to make sure that the public understands what the technology is doing,” McMurry and her co-authors write. “Even if an app is privacy-preserving, the public may not perceive it as such.”
Graduate student Kenyatta McLean speaks with Fast Company reporter Nate Berg about BlackSpace, a non-profit she co-founded that aims to bring communities of color into the urban planning decision-making process. “We know that heritage is such an important part of Black neighborhoods and is something that Black neighborhoods continue to produce and conserve themselves, so we did want to amplify that work,” says McLean.
Writing for The New Yorker, Bernard Avishai spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work exploring the need for a revolution in financial engineering to help spur the development of vaccines, and how a vaccine megafund could have assisted in bringing the Covid-19 pandemic under control. “The more I studied this, the more I realized that finance actually plays a huge role in drug development,” says Lo, “in many cases, way too big a role.”
USA Today reporter Barbara VanDenburgh highlights Prof. Sara Seager’s new book in a roundup of “not to miss” upcoming releases. “After the unexpected death of her husband, an MIT astrophysicist looks to the stars for solace – and inside herself for answers – in this moving memoir,” writes VanDenburgh.
“Ride-hailing’s profitability aspirations ultimately conflict with its desire to upend the global auto market,” writes research affiliate Ashley Nunes for the Financial Times. “These companies have a choice. By the virtue of raising or lowering fares they can either excite investors or thrill consumers. But they can’t do both.”
Prof. Arnold Barnett speaks with Newsweek reporter Alexandra Schonfeld about his new research estimating the risk of contracting Covid-19 on an airplane. "I tried to take into account several things, including the fact that air travel travelers—as a group—might be less likely to be carriers of COVID than randomly chosen citizens," says Barnett.
Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology have “discovered a way to increase antimicrobial sensitivity in bacteria by exposing them to hydrogen sulphide (H2S),” reports Health Europa.
As part of a SHOOKtalks session, Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, discusses how the pandemic has altered the way financial advisors work with clients, reports R.J. Shook for Forbes. “The one thing COVID did is it pushed technology into our lives,” says Coughlin. “It is not a novelty. COVID showed us that technology actually adds new value.”
MIT alumna Angeline Jacques speaks with Archinect reporter Katherine Guimapang about her design for a new conceptual framework for Glacier National Park and her experience entering the workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic. Jacques explains that her MIT thesis “was on the design of National Parks in the age of climate change and spanned geography, landscape, and architecture as disciplines.”
New Scientist spotlights “Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn,” a new book by Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning, and Luke Yoquinto, a research affiliate at the MIT AgeLab. The book explores how “scientific findings in wildly different fields are transforming the way we learn and teach.”
Prof. Thomas Malone speaks with Nicolás Rivero at Quartz about Minglr, a new videoconferencing platform he co-created that replicates the type of chance meetings that happen at in-person conferences. “The most important part of conferences by far is what happens in the hallways,” said Malone, “not what happens in the meeting rooms.”
Writing for New Scientist, Vijaysree Venkatraman spotlights “Coded Bias,” a new documentary that chronicles graduate student Joy Buolamwini’s “journey to uncover racial and sexist bias in face-recognition software and other artificial intelligence systems.”
MIT researchers have developed an AI algorithm called MosAIc that “can spot connections between works from different cultures, artists and mediums,” writes Theresa Machemer for Smithsonian Magazine. “We hope this approach can be used as a tool to help art historians find new patterns in history and gather evidence to support their hypotheses,” says PhD student Mark Hamilton.
In his new book “Money for Nothing,” Prof. Thomas Levenson “interweaves the story of the rise of mathematics and astronomy with the rise of bankers and actuaries and stock promoters,” writes James Grant in a review for the Wall Street Journal.