Faculty

Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Heitman highlights Prof. Alan Lightman’s book, “The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science.” Heitman writes Lightman’s “gift for distilling complex ideas and emotions to their bright essence quickly wins the day.” He adds that Lightman “belongs to a noble tradition of science writers, including Oliver Sacks and Lewis Thomas, who can poke endlessly into a subject and, in spite of their prodding, or perhaps because of it, stir up fresh embers of wonder.”

Prof. Albert Saiz discusses how older Americans are impacting the real estate market in the Greater Boston area. “There’s a mismatch now,” saysSaiz. “As people age in place, these households tend to be two people or sometimes one person in maybe a three- or four-bedroom home. Since they’re not downsizing as we expected, we have a huge, huge need for bigger homes to host younger families.”

Prof. Gang Chen speaks with Times Higher Education reporter Pola Lem about how “government interference has created an atmosphere of fear for foreign-born academics in the US.” Says Chen, “I don’t expect myself to go back to what I was before, but I’m also determined. I’m not going to be beaten in my science. I’m going to become stronger through this ordeal.” He adds, “I hope basic science can remain open.”

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Prof. Simon Johnson outlines how regulation and supervision of the banking industry should be strengthened following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. “A well-regulated system is still the right goal,” writes Johnson. “The Federal Reserve needs to overhaul and improve its bank supervision — and to make that consistent with its macroeconomic policy for interest rates.”

Prof. Emeritus Peter Diamond speaks with Boston Globe reporter Scot Lehigh about the future of Social Security. “Given the large past differences in the approaches of the two parties, it is important that citizens press members of Congress to be specific about their views on fixing the program,” says Diamond. “And it’s just as important that voters let their members of Congress know their own views.”

New York Times reporter Thomas May spotlights Prof. Tod Machover’s chamber opera “Overstory Overture,” based on Richard Powers’s novel “The Overstory.” May notes that Machover “has developed novel approaches to electronics and is a trailblazer in the applications of artificial intelligence to music.” Of his desire to create an operatic adaptation of Powers’s book, Machover explains, “I’ve always wanted to write a theatrical work with many strands that come together in an unusual way.”

Prof. Hari Balakrishnan has been selected as the recipient of the Marconi Prize for “fundamental discoveries in wired and wireless networking, mobile sensing, and distributed systems,” reports the Press Trust of India. “The Marconi Prize is awarded annually by The Marconi Society to innovators who have significantly contributed to increasing digital inclusivity through advanced information and communications technology.”

Prof. Kerry Emanuel and First Street Foundation have found that based on warming climate conditions and patterns, future storms will increase in intensity and travel farther north up the East Coast, reports Leslie Kaufman and Eric Roston for Bloomberg.

Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with CNN reporters Ella Nilsen and Renée Rigdon about future hurricane trends. “The bottom line is the models that are being used by the existing [catastrophe] modeling industry are based strictly on historical statistics,” says Emanuel. “The historical record isn’t very long, and it isn’t very good when you get back to before 1970.”

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explore how generative artificial intelligence “presents a philosophical and practical challenge on a scale not experienced since the beginning of the Enlightenment.” Huttenlocher, Kissinger and Schmidt make the case that “parameters for AI’s responsible use need to be established, with variation based on the type of technology and the context of deployment.”

Writing for Fortune, Prof. Elazer R. Edelman and Mike Mussallem of Edwards Lifesciences write that the backlog of deferred medical treatments caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting long-term health consequences could impact public health for years. Edelman and Mussallem emphasize that “it is incumbent upon us to identify timely real-world evidence to elucidate the effects of policy changes so they can be adaptive and agile enough to provide access to critical interventions and procedures.”

After almost 50 years, the MIT Juggling Club, which was founded in 1975 and then merged with a unicycle club, is the oldest drop-in juggling club in continuous operation and still welcomes any aspiring jugglers to come toss a ball into the air, reports Stacy Kess for Cambridge Day. Through the years the club has “attracted a cross-section of humanity: young, old, students, professors, people who changed the course of the world, artists, writers, performers and the juggling-curious,” writes Kess. 

Prof. M. Taylor Fravel, director of the MIT Security Studies Program, speaks with New Yorker reporter Isaac Chotiner about China’s military strategy and the future of U.S.-China relations. “In the last five years, China, with a much more modern military, has many more options that it can draw from when it’s thinking about how to advance its interests,” says Fravel. “It can use displays of force to much greater effect than before.”

Washington Post reporter Michael Andor Brodeur spotlights Prof. Tod Machover’s work exploring the concepts and techniques needed to advance the future of music, including using AI to help “exponentially increase access to music and creative tools for making it.” Machover explains that to him “pieces of music aren’t just pieces of sound. They’re because some human being thought something was important to communicate and express.”

Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman spotlights several MIT startups that are using AI to generate 3-D environments. Common Sense Machines, an MIT startup, is “trying to enhance the creativity of its app by adding a bit of, well, common sense,” writes Pressman. “Human babies form an understanding of the world by developing abstract models. Common Sense Machines is trying to add similar models to its 3D world builder.”