School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes 10 new faculty
Dean Agustín Rayo and the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently welcomed 10 new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their...
View ArticleHow an archeological approach can help leverage biased data in AI to improve...
The classic computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out” lacks nuance when it comes to understanding biased medical data, argue computer science and bioethics professors from MIT, Johns Hopkins...
View ArticleHow to keep people out of the emergency room
Encouraging immigrants to visit primary care doctors creates a striking decline in costly emergency room use, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT economist.The findings are from a New York...
View ArticleHow to tackle the global deforestation crisis
Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests — and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That’s nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between...
View ArticleFour Lincoln Laboratory technologies win five 2023 R&D 100 awards
Ultrasound that doesn’t require touching patients. A web-based tool that reinvents crew scheduling for the Air Force. Cryptographic hardware that protects sensitive data. And the world’s first...
View ArticleAncient Amazonians intentionally created fertile “dark earth”
The Amazon river basin is known for its immense and lush tropical forests, so one might assume that the Amazon’s land is equally rich. In fact, the soils underlying the forested vegetation,...
View ArticleRe-imagining our theories of language
Over a decade ago, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko asked 48 English speakers to complete tasks like reading sentences, recalling information, solving math problems, and listening to music. As they did...
View ArticleProfessor Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, influential philosopher and historian of...
MIT Professor Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, a distinguished and groundbreaking philosopher and historian of science, died on Sept. 22, at age 87.Keller gained acclaim for her powerful critique of the...
View ArticleQ&A: The BRICS expansion and the global balance of power
In early September, the BRICS group of countries with emerging economies — an informal alliance among Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — announced it would expand its ranks by six...
View ArticleHave you heard about the “whom of which” trend?
Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses, which add information to sentences. For instance: “The senator, with...
View ArticleMIT welcomes nine MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars for 2023-24
Established in 1990, the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at MIT welcomes outstanding scholars to the Institute for visiting appointments. MIT aspires to attract candidates who are, in the...
View ArticleGiving students the computational chops to tackle 21st-century challenges
Graduate student Nikasha Patel ’22 is using artificial intelligence to build a computational model of how infants learn to walk, which could help robots acquire motor skills in a similar fashion.Her...
View ArticleWho will benefit from AI?
What if we’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence the wrong way?After all, AI is often discussed as something that could replicate human intelligence and replace human work. But there is an...
View ArticleJ-PAL North America and Results for America announce 18 collaborations with...
J-PAL North America and Results for America have announced 18 new partnerships with state and local governments across the country through their Leveraging Evidence and Evaluation for Equitable...
View ArticleFinding solidarity in the teachers’ lounge
In the United States, social institutions from church organizations to sports leagues occupy key roles in shaping political life, with unions perhaps the most familiar player, affecting change in...
View ArticleFellowship program empowers Nigerian academics to transform engineering...
Empowering the Teachers (ETT), a program launched at MIT in 2011, is helping to change the face of engineering education in Nigerian universities. The program brings talented Nigerian academics at the...
View ArticleMIT SHASS Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship Program welcomes 2023-24 class
The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship program recently welcomed its 2023-24 class.The purpose of the program is to enhance diversity in SHASS...
View ArticleA reciprocal relationship with the land in Hawaiʻi
Aja Grande grew up on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu, between the Kona and ʻEwa districts, nurtured by her community and the natural environment. Her family has lived in Hawaiʻi for generations; while...
View ArticleNathaniel Hendren wants to understand the conditions of opportunity
The U.S. is a land of opportunity, but it’s a complicated thing. People in the workforce today are much less likely to earn more than their parents did, compared to people born around 1940. Some parts...
View ArticleInstitute Professor Daron Acemoglu Wins A.SK Social Science Award
Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor and the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in MIT’s School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, is the 2023 recipient of the WZB Berlin Social...
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