Upcoming Events
How Can We Feed a Growing World and Sustain the Planet?
Speaker: Professor Jonathan Foley
Director, Institute on the Environment (IonE), University of Minnesota
Board of Advisors, The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics at MIT
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 4:30PM
Venue: E51-115, Reception following in Building 54, Room 923.
12th Annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture
Jonathan Foley is the director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of the Minnesota, where he is a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. He also leads the IonE's Global Landscapes Initiative.
Foley's work focuses on the sustainability of our civilization and the global environment. He and his students have contributed to our understanding of global food security, global patterns of land use, the behavior of the planet's climate, ecosystems and water cycle, and the sustainability of the biosphere. This work has led him to be a regular advisor to large corporations, NGOs and governments around the world.
Foley joined the University of Minnesota in 2008, after spending 15 years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he founded the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. He and his colleagues have published numerous articles in the scientific literature, including highly cited work in Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also written many popular articles and essays, including pieces in the New York Times, Scientific American, SEED, E360, the Guardian, Momentum, and elsewhere. His public presentations on global issues have been featured at hundreds of venues, including the Aspen Environmental Forum, the Quatauqua Institution, and TED.
Foley has won numerous awards and honors, including the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Award; the J.S. McDonnell Foundation's 21st Century Science Award; an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship; and the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Co-Sponsor(s): Center for Global Change Science, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)
Womens Right's in Iran and the Islamic World
Speaker: Dr. Shirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 4-5 PM
Venue: MIT- Wong Auditorium (E51-115)
Part of Institute Diversity Summit
Shirin Ebadi is a lawyer, human rights activist, and the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her work defending the rights of women and children in Iran, and advocating an interpretation of Islam which is compatible with democracy and human rights. She is the first Iranian and Muslim woman to receive the prize. Ebadi received a law degree from the University of Tehran in 1965, and became one of the first female judges in Iran.
In 1975, she was the first Iranian woman to preside over a legislative court. Following Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, Ebadi was demoted to the position of a clerk in the court she had presided over because the revolution deemed women unfit to serve as judges. Unable to accept the discrimination against her, she resigned, and although her application was repeatedly rejected, finally obtained a license to open a law firm. For the next two decades, Ebadi devoted her life to the promotion of women's rights, the defense of children, and political activists. Her organization, the Association for Human Rights Advocates, provides pro bono legal service to political prisoners in Iran. Shirin Ebadi has spoken out strongly against discrimination and injustice in her country, at times despite great risk to her own safety.
In 2000, she spent a month in solitary confinement as a result of defending the family of a student killed by the police in protests in Tehran. Shirin Ebadi's principal arena is the struggle for basic human rights and the fundamental value that political power in a community must be built on democratic elections. She favors dialogue as the best path to changing attitudes and resolving conflict, and as a conscious Muslim believes there is no conflict between Islam and fundamental human rights.
Dr. Ebadi is the founder of three NGOs in Iran, The Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Child, The Association for Human Rights Advocates, and the Organization against Mines in Iran. She is the author of 14 books, including available in English a memoir Iran Awakening; Refugee Law in Iran; and, The Golden Cage.
Will Technology Save the World?
Speakers: Rosalind Picard, Jose Gomez-Marquez, Susan Silbey,
George Barbastathis, Ian Hutchinson
Date: March 9, 2012 at 6:00p-8:00p
Venue: W-16, Kresge Auditorium, MIT
[Open to General Public]
Rosalind Picard
Founder and Director of the Affective Computing Research Group, MIT Media Laboratory
Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab. The author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in multidimensional signal modeling, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, Picard is known internationally for pioneering research in affective computing and, prior to that, research in content-based image and video retrieval. She is a graduate with honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.
George Barbasthasis
Singapore Research Professor of Optics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT
Dr. George Barbastathis is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and Faculty Resident with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1993, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 1994 and '97, respectively. Between 1997-99 he was a Post-doctoral Research Associate with the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Between 2006-2007 he was Visiting Scholar with the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. He has been the recipient of the Nikolaos Kritikos award in Mathematics, the 3M Innovation Award, the NSF Young Investigator Award, and the Esther & Harold E. Edgerton junior chair at MIT. He and his team at the SMART center developed an “invisibility cloak” using a very simple and inexpensive system. This method of using Science to hide objects in plain sight was voted in the top 10 breakthroughs in Physics in 2010.
Jose Gomez-Marquez
Program Director, Innovations in International Health Initiative, MIT
Jose Gomez-Marquez is the program director for the Innovations in International Health initiative at MIT. He leads a team of multidisciplinary team of scientists to design medical devices for developing countries. He is co-inventor of the Aerovax Drug Delivery System, a device for mass delivery of inhalable drugs and vaccines to remote populations and the X out TB program, which aims to increase TB therapy adherence in developing countries using novel diagnostics and mobile technology. Recently, the group has developed the MEDIKit, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their medical technologies.
Jose serves on the European Union's Science Against Poverty Taskforce and has participated as an expert advisor in the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is an instructor of MIT's D-Lab: Health, a course on designing global health technologies at MIT. Jose is a 3 time MIT IDEAS Competition winner, including two Lemelson Awards for International Technology. In 2009, Jose was selected to Technology Review's T35, which also named him Humanitarian of the Year. In 2011 he was named a TED Fellow. Born and raised in Honduras he currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Susan S. Sibley
Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, MIT
Professor Silbey is Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Professor Silbey is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships (2009), the Harry Kalven Jr. Prize for advancing the sociology of law (2009), Doctor Honoris Causa from Ecole Normale Superiere Cachan, in Paris (2006). She is also Past President of the Law & Society Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Silbey received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and post-graduate training in ethnography in the Sociology Department of Brandeis University. She has written about the social organization of law in diverse institutional and informal settings including attorney general's offices, courts, schools, private homes, businesses and scientific laboratories; she has also studied alternative forms of dispute resolution including negotiation and mediation. She has edited Studies in Law, Politics and Society (1990-1997) and the Law & Society Review (1998-2000). In 1998, she published The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (with Patricia Ewick) describing the ways in which Americans imagine, use, and construct the rule of law, in 2003, In Litigation: Do the 'Haves' Still Come Out Ahead? (edited with Herbert Kritzer), and in 2008 Law and Science I, Epistemological, Evidentiary, and Relational Engagements, and Law and Science II, Regulation of Property, Practices, and Products.
Silbey's current research looks at the roles and conceptions of law in scientific laboratories, comparing the place of law in expert communities and popular culture, with special attention to the ways in which complex technological organizations observe and govern themselves. She is supervising an experiment in ethnographic fieldwork on the development of new safety regimes in research labs. In addition, she is completing a six year longitudinal study of engineering education, following a cohort of students through four different engineering schools.
"However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible."
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934. (Columbia)
"Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it."
Albert Einstein, in an address at Caltech, 1931. (Harper)
"Technology shapes society and society shapes technology."
Robert S. White, Environmental Science and Technology, 1990. (S&S)
Of Turbo-Charged, Heat-Seeking, Robotic Fishing Poles
(or, Myths of Technology for International Development)
Speaker: Kentaro Toyama, Moderator: Manish Bharadwaj
Date: March 1, 2012 at 6:30PM
Venue: Bldg. 35, Room 225, MIT
[Open to General Public]
Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare? How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? What value is video technology to a farmer earning $1 a day?
Interventionist projects in “information and communication technology for development” (ICT4D) seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated excessive hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. In this talk, I will (1) present several persistent myths of ICT4D, (2) offer a theory of "technology as amplifier" which explains the gap between rhetoric and reality, and (3) provide recommendations for engineers and scientists interested in contributing to a better world. My hope is to suggest that while technology might not save the world, technologists have much to contribute.
Kentaro Toyama (www.kentarotoyama.org) is a researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book that argues that the intrinsic growth of people and institutions should be the primary focus of global development. Previously, Toyama co-founded Microsoft Research India, where he started an interdisciplinary research group to understand how electronic technology could support the socio-economic development of the world's impoverished communities. The group's projects - including Digital Green, MultiPoint, and Text-Free UI - have been seminal in ICT4D research, even as Toyama has gone on to be a vocal critic of techno-utopian hype in development. Prior to his time in India, he did computer vision research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.
2012 IAP Sessions
Re-imagining the World in 2050: Equity, Action and Targets
Mobilizing Youth for Transformative Change
What does the world look like in 2012? What will it look like in 2050? How do politics, scientific evidence, social marketing and human rights converge to socially transform what the world chooses to tackle? The goal is to not accept the world as is; but to re-imagine our vision for 2050 - and lay out a plan to meet it. You will serve as key consultants on active problem-solving on to help do just this.
Right now, the world is crowded and unfair. There will be at least 9 billion people in 2050, with 1.1 billion undernourished and another 1 billion overweight. 1 billion people wil be over the age of 60. Resources are dwindling. 9 million children die before reaching their 5th birthday. 36 million die from man-made risks. The richest 16% of the world uses 80% of the world's drugs. The poorest 17% use 1%. We can barely afford the status-quo; and yet, daily, we are hit with shock after shock. What to do?
These lectures will challenge you. They will force you to to think about a 2050 vision from the lens of Equity, Action and Targets -- key themes in mobilizing for change as university students have done over generations (e.g. civil rights, anti-apartheid movements and the HIV/AIDS movement). All the lecturers who will lead sessions are themselves university student and young professional game-changers. You will work with each other, and you will be put in touch with lecturers in advance and after their talk as teams to help solve problems in real-time.
You will work with a young lawyer profiled on ESPN and NPR, the recipient of a bone marrow transplant and preparing to become Nigeria's first winter olympics athtlete. He wants to bring a bone marrow registry and cancer care to his home in Nigeria. You will meet a young doctor fighting to rid the world of a man-made, corporate agent that kills 6 million people each year. You will team up with a Duke undergraduate who is spearheading a global, university-centered movement to end the mining of minerals in the Congo; mining in these conflict zones drives a civil war that has cost more lives than any war since World War II.
This won't be academic. Far from it. Your ideas and recommendations throughout the series on real-life case-studies will help the lecturers form action plans on next steps. We will work on communication of a narrative to compel others to action. Moreover, your ideas will feed into reports for the global organization the Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network, which was represented at the 2011 United Nations General Assembly. We will champion your points in a report prepared for senior UN delegates, ambassadors; but also for the grassroots human rights community. We are looking for the best ideas to put forward concerning the future of our planet.
Will you join us?
The world in 2012 and 2050| Transformation of a Sick Society
Date: January 23, 2012 (5PM-6:30PM)
Venue: MIT Bldg. 2, Room 105
How sick is our society, locally and globally? And who is accountable for it? Together, we will uncover how the distribution of resources and human capital for global health actually works; next, we will identify key opportunities and niches to innovate in the spheres of Equity, Action and Targets. We will do an analysis with thought leaders who drove the grassroots social movement and the “grasstop” political process at a historic United Nations General Assembly session on health/non-communicable diseases in 2011, only the 2nd ever such session of its kind (the first was on HIV/AIDS that changed the world). Will our generation step up?
Dr. Sandeep P. Kishore is a Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School/Global Health Delivery Project and Co-Chair of the Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network (YPCDN). He is a 2011 Fellow at the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics & Transformative Values at MIT.
Just say yes to drugs | Essential medicines for the world
Date: January 25, 2012 (5PM-6:30PM)
Venue: MIT Bldg. 2, Room 105
How do medicines and vaccines get to people? How does a discovery in a MIT laboratory get translated into a life-saving therapy? And, critically, how do univesity intellectual property decisions and pharmaceutical trade provisions materially affect who gets access to life-saving medicines? Is there a way to reduce the cost of medicines by de-linking the price from R&D costs? Even if we get the cost downs, once how do we ensure that it actually gets to patients who need it most. Together, we will actively work on the new questions pharmaceutical policy reform.
Dr. Sandeep P. Kishore is a Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School/Global Health Delivery Project and Co-Chair of the Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network (YPCDN). He is a 2011 Fellow at the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics & Transformative Values at MIT.
Seun's Story | The 2014 Winter Olympics, Nigeria, Cancer and You
Date: January 27, 2012 (5PM-6:30PM)
Venue: MIT Bldg. 2, Room 105
In 2009, while studying law at Yale University, Seun Adebiyi was training to become the first athlete to represent Nigeria at the Winter Olympics (sport: Skeleton) when he was diagnosed with two rare and aggressive cancers: lymphoblastic lymphoma and stem-cell leukemia. He desperately needed a bone marrow transplant to survive. However, like over 83% of African/African-American cancer patients, Seun was unable to find a matching donor. Fortunately, he received an umbilical cord blood transplant, and is now dedicated to building a bone marrow registry in Nigeria in order to increase the diversity of the international donor pool. His lecture will describe some of the challenges of building a registry in a low-resource country and consul you for your input in designing next steps. Seun has been profiled on ESPN and award-winning documentaries as the “Skeleton Man.”
Seun Adebiyi is a cancer survivor, a lawyer and is now training to be first Nigerian athlete in the Winter Olympics. His vision is to build the first bone marrow registry in Nigeria.
Tobacco | A man-made, profit-driven disaster that kills 6 million people annually
Date: January 30, 2012 (5PM-6:30PM)
Venue: MIT Bldg. 2, Room 105
What is the only legal product that knowingly kills over half of its users? And why is the use of this deadly product growing in many of the poorest parts of the world? How did the production and use of an obscure medicinal weed used ceremoniously in pre-Columbian North America get industrialized into a vector for a man-made epidemic of disease that killed 100 million people in the 20th Century, and projected to kill 1 billion this century? And what are the effective strategies that have been pioneered in rich and poor parts of the world to combat this scourge? We will explore these and other vexing questions around tobacco - likely the leading fully preventable cause of death and disability worldwide.
Dr. Asaf Bitton has over 10 years of experience in tobacco control in the devleoping world and is leading efforts to reform America's primary care system. He is a primary care physician at the Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
War in the Congo & the push for “conflict-free” electronics | Will universities lead?
Date: February 1, 2012 (5PM-6:30PM)
Venue: MIT Bldg. 2, Room 105
Over 10 years ago, concernted activists notified major electronics manufacturers of a perilous connection between the mining of basic minerals in their cellphones and a deadly civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As major corporations turned a blind-eye, this conflict has rapidly evolved into the deadliest war since World War II - with nearly 6 million Congolese killed in the past decade. Just now, student activists have recently brought this issue global attention, with Stanford undergraduates succesfully lobbying their Board of Trustees to shift investment policy in companies still utilizing “conflict minerals” in 2010. Now, Duke and 50+ schools are considering action. With your help, MIT can become the new leader in the “conflict-free” movement to rid the electronics industry of blood minerals?
Sanjay Kishore is a student member of the “Coalition for a Conflict-Free Duke.” He is a junior majoring in the “Social Determinants of Health.”
Your Turn. Student Roundtable on Solutions to the problems laid out / Recommendations to the UN
Date: February 3, 2012 (5PM-6:30PM)
Venue: MIT Bldg. 2, Room 105
Moderated by Dr. Sandeep Kishore
Working groups report-back and present iterated recommendations for the lecturers and the problems described to ensure follow-through & Drafting of recommendations for the UN under Equity, Action and Target domains.
Dr. Sandeep P. Kishore is a Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School/Global Health Delivery Project and Co-Chair of the Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network (YPCDN). He is a 2011 Fellow at the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics & Transformative Values at MIT.
Event Co-sponsors:
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