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Geography RSS FeedsSociable Robots - Cynthia Breazeal SM ‘93, SCD ‘00, Sherry Turkle Cynthia Breazeal makes social robots, machines with the capacity to interact with people on psychological terms. She says they “open up a new world of questions.” But these increasingly sophisticated devices make Sherry Turkle uneasy, since they challenge the idea of human relationships and the very “purpose, importance, of living things.” Since inventing her famously expressive, anthropomorphic Kismet, a robot that engages and learns from people through auditory, facial and social cues, Breazeal has evolved her work using robots as a scientific tool for social understanding. Her labs are putting robots through the paces of major child development milestones, such as appreciating the mental states of others. For instance, robot Leonardo has rudimentary object permanence, inferring from a tricky human’s behavior where a Big Bird toy has been hidden. Another project uses robots in home-based wei...Feed Source: mitworld.mit.edu Reflections on an MIT Education - A. Neil Pappalardo '64 In a neat series of time capsules tagged to his MIT experience, Neil Pappalardo shares his story with MIT graduates in the hope that it will give them “an idea of the possibilities that lie ahead.”
His story begins in 1964, when as a senior majoring in Physics, he decided to pursue a thesis on a medical topic, without, Pappalardo notes, having attended a single course in design or synthesis. He met cardiologists at a Boston hospital searching for a labor-saving way to analyze hours’ worth of EKG data. In a matter of months, he had invented a device to solve the problem, graduated in Electrical Engineering, and set out for a career at Mass. General Hospital. Lesson learned: “An MIT education will awaken creativity and discovery within you.”
Pappalardo recounts his early financial hardships (he had to sell blood for 12 weeks in order to buy a piano for his wife), as well as setbacks in trying to improve the complex and... "The New Epoch" and the 21st Century Imperative for Engineering History - David P. Billington Great civil engineers finds an aesthetic appropriate for their building’s material and structure, asserts David Billington, whose life work has been the study of some of the world’s most stunning engineering feats.
He reviews his own intellectual journey, first honoring some of his forebears, including Elting Morison, industrial historian and a founder of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society, and R. G. Collingwood, philosopher/historian. Billington describes a momentous turn in his career at Princeton, when architecture students in one of his courses rebuked him: “They told me, we hate what you’re teaching us. You’re teaching us stick diagrams and formulas. That’s how you teach structural engineering. Why can’t we study beautiful structures?”
They showed him a picture of the Salginatobel Bridge, built by “an obscure Swiss engineer, Robert Maillart,” about whom there was little published in English. This led to a... High-Eco-Tech: Building Avant la Garde - Werner Sobek There’s more than a little magic in Werner Sobek’s constructions, which balance aesthetics, architectural constraints and pathbreaking science to, in his words, “go beyond” nature’s own limits.
Sobek walks us through his portfolio of engineering feats, enabled by a worldwide architecture and engineering business, and by his affiliated institute, where researchers are let loose on the most demanding problems of the business. For instance, in 1997, his group began to address a key issue the architecture and construction trades engaged in only through “theoretical discussion:” how to design a Triple 0 building –for zero energy consumption, zero energy emissions and complete recycle-ability.
Such innovative constructions require new, lightweight, recycle-able, load-bearing material. His interdisciplinary research team found inspiration in human bones, whose internal architecture is made up of cells arranged according to a certain geometr... Youth and Civic Engagement - Lance Bennett, Ingeborg Endter SM '00, Alan Khazei With the right tools and backing, children of the 21st century are set to make their mark on the world. These panelists want to ensure that young people passionately engage with the world, using new media to “shape changes around them,” as Mitchel Resnick puts it.
For Lance Bennett, “the future of democracy seems to be at stake.” Typically, schools fail to teach children politics, and civic education turns kids off. This is happening as modern society “falls apart in important ways,” with social hierarchies and authorities fading in importance, and membership organizations that confer status losing clout. But new forms are emerging such as social networks and participatory media. Young people born into the digital age have a different take on citizenship, and are “predisposed for interacting, sharing knowledge across peer networks,” for creating content and assessing the credibility of people and... A Roadmap for the Edge of the Internet - Alan Benner In the curious way of technological evolution, we first had computers that occupied entire rooms, watched them shrink to desktop, laptop and palm-sized devices, and now find ourselves coming full circle, and then some, Alan Benner reports. He tells this MIT class about warehouse-sized data centers, linking processors, and ensembles of processors, in dizzyingly complex hierarchies. These gigantic operations, some with their own power and air conditioning plants, are central to the enterprise of Internet behemoths Google, Amazon and YouTube, but have not yet percolated out to more traditional companies like insurance firms -- a situation Benner and his IBM colleagues would like to remedy.
Benner describes in broad strokes how these data operations are organized into levels of “virtualization and consolidation,” where the hardware is hidden, yet the data is both fully accessible and secure, no matter where the user and the computers are located. Th... Diversifying Cities: Migration, Habitation, and Community Development - Anna Hardman, MCP ‘71, PhD ‘88, Abel Valenzuela, Jr. MCP ‘88, PhD ‘95, Jessica Andors, MCP ‘99 The largest scale migration in human history, says Xavier de Souza Briggs, is potentially the most transformative as well. It’s time to consider new frames for issues, he says -- not rehash “civic life as a competition over power” but perhaps see this as a moment when we can realize, finally, the ancient idea of a citizenship. For planners, this may mean learning “how to create a welcoming place, a sense of what’s possible.”
At least 3% of the world’s population today live in places where they were not born, says Anna Hardman, and this number is rapidly rising. And yet “immigrants are invisible in dramatic and not so dramatic ways.” When riots exploded outside Paris two years ago, “policy makers had no tools to grasp what was happening” because they hadn’t collected information on immigrants in those neighborhoods. “They thought it would destroy the perc... Leading with Information Technology - Marshall N. Carter Marshall Carter leads an MIT class through a case study on corporate transformation, highlighting tips he believes are as salient for engineering students as for those focused on business services.
Don’t turn to the best-seller lists for advice on change, advises Carter, since most books pick up the story after a business has made the strategic decision to remake itself. Carter’s decade (1991-2001) with Boston’s venerable State Street Bank helps illuminate the thinking that comes before the decision, and the steps necessary to fulfill it.
State Street, Carter recounts, had focused primarily on processing transactions, such as the purchase or sale of stocks and bonds, only to watch its key products age, and revenues drop. At the same time, “customers were asking us for more and more information,” such as the IBM pension manager’s request for the geographic distribution of his plan’s mutual funds. State Street did not then ... Building Responsive Cities: Technology, Design, and Development - Dennis Frenchman, MCP ‘76, MAA ‘76, Antonio Di Mambro ‘71, MAA ‘77, MCP ‘77, Martha Lampkin Welborne, MCP ‘81, MAA ‘81, Thomas J. Campanella, PhD ‘99 Even as new supercities pop up around the world, with populations in the tens of millions, urban planning remains stuck in an older time. As Dennis Frenchman says, “Amazingly very little progress has been made We’re using basically the models and methods of the 1920s.” Frenchman says we need to confront the immense challenges of rapid urbanization, universal mobility sustainability and basic livability.
Some emerging concepts include new century cities, where single “messy” mixed-use zones will house shopping, living, and commerce. He describes technology networks built into urban environments, producing streams of data that not only reveal how a city works, but allow better real-time management of systems. Cities will sense traffic flows and change street signage and lane markings accordingly. Smart cars wi... Human Augmentation - John Hockenberry, Hugh Herr, SM ‘93 These two MIT Museum speakers hope you’ll walk away from their talk with a good case of augmentation envy – or at least a healthy respect for what technology can do for the human body and soul.
John Hockenberry has used a wheelchair for 30 years, since a car accident left him a paraplegic. He tells us the public has viewed spinal cord injuries like his as “something horrific,” or “staggeringly poignant.” But in the last 10 years, disability has moved from being “an extraordinarily fringe activity” to a central issue facing society, that of “marrying technology with humanity in a way that is organic to the body, appropriate to the spirit and sustainable to the community.” Hockenberry believes that the needs and demands of disabled people are helping push science toward creating a set of design principles “that will allow this issue of human restoration and augmentation to merge into a kind of seamless unity.”
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