Past Events

Biobot: Converting Sewers Into Public Health Observatories Mariana Matus and Peter R Chai   As Biobot’s CEO & Cofounder, Mariana Matus leads technology and product development. During her PhD in computational biology at MIT, Mariana co-founded the MIT Underworlds Project: an interdisciplinary research collaboration between the Alm Lab and Senseable City Lab to study a city’s collective microbiome for public health insights. Through Underworlds, she worked closely with engineers, designers, chemists, virologists, and public health practitioners to develop methods and…

Jason Jackson is Ford Career Development Assistant Professor in Political Economy and Urban Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Jason’s research focuses on the relationship between states and markets. It seeks to understand the historical origins and evolution of the institutional arrangements through which states and markets are constituted from the late 19th century to the present. Jason’s work is particularly focused on the role of economic ideas and moral beliefs in shaping market institutions. Jason is…

Professor and Director of Affective Computing Research at the MIT Media Lab, Rosalind Picard invents technologies for understanding the emotions and behaviors that impact health and wellbeing. She wrote the book Affective Computing, which described how to give machines the skills of emotional intelligence, and is credited for launching the growing field of Affective Computing. Author of over 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles and inventor on over a dozen patents, Picard co-founded two companies: Empatica, providing the first AI-based smart watch…

Randall Davis has been a Full Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT since 1989. He has served as Associate Director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1993-1998), as a Research Director of CSAIL from 2003-2007, and as Associate Director of CSAIL from 2012-2014. Dr. Davis has been a seminal contributor to the fields of knowledge-based systems and human-computer interaction, publishing more than 100 articles and playing a central role in the development of several systems. He…

Mariette DiChristina is the dean of the College of Communication at Boston University and a nationally recognized science journalist. Before arriving in 2019, DiChristina was the editor-in-chief and executive vice president of Scientific American, as well as executive vice president, magazines, of the magazine’s publisher, Springer Nature. The first woman to head Scientific American since its founding in 1845, she led the editorial team to honors including the coveted National Magazine Award for General Excellence. In her Springer Nature role,…

MIT Sea Grant visiting artist Keith Ellenbogen explores the diverse marine ecosystem off the coast of Boston and Cape Cod through underwater photography and imaging techniques like microscopy. The photographer was awarded a National Marine Sanctuary Foundation Ernest F. Hollings Ocean Awareness Award to fund “Space to Sea,” a three-year characterization of the sanctuary. Ellenbogen works with key scientists, engineers and students at the intersection of art, science, and technology to enrich public perception of local waters, and recently presented…

Daniel Huttenlocher is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Previously he helped found Cornell Tech, the digital technology oriented graduate school created by Cornell University in New York City, and served as its first Dean and Vice Provost. His research and teaching have been recognized by a number of awards including ACM Fellow and CASE Professor of the Year. He has a mix of academic and industry background, having been a Computer Science faculty member at…

Sarah Kopper is a Research Manager at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She works to improve research operations at J-PAL with a focus on research resources shared across J-PAL’s offices and projects. Her research focuses on the relationship between agricultural input markets, input use, and production in Eastern and Southern Africa. Claire Walsh is a Senior Policy Manager and leads J-PAL’s Environment & Energy team, J-PAL’s Innovation in Government Initiative, and works on J-PAL’s Gender sector. In…