Kendall Square’s community took a deep dive into the history and future of the region at the Kendall Square Association’s 15^th annual meeting on Oct. 19.

It’s no secret that Kendall Square, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, moves fast. The event, titled “Looking Back, Looking Ahead,” gave community members a chance to pause and reflect on how far the region has come and to discuss efforts to shape where it’s going next.

“The impact of the last 15 years of working together with a purposeful commitment to make the world a better place was on display this evening,” KSA Executive Director Beth O’Neill Maloney told the audience toward the end of the evening. “It also shows how Kendall Square can continue contributing to the world.”

The gathering took place at the Microsoft NERD Center on Memorial Drive, on a floor that also featured music from the Kendall Square Orchestra and, judging by the piles of empty trays at the end of the night, an exceedingly popular selection of food from Kendall Square restaurants. Attendees came from across Cambridge’s prolific innovation ecosystem — not just entrepreneurs and life science workers but also high school and college students, restaurant and retail shop owners, workers at local cleantech and robotics companies, and leaders of nonprofits.

KSA itself is a nonprofit made up of over 150 organizations across Kendall Square, from major companies to universities like MIT to research organizations like the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the independent shops and restaurants that give Kendall Square its distinct character.

The night’s programming included talks about recent funding achievements in the region, a panel discussion on the implications of artificial intelligence, and a highly entertaining, whirlwind history lesson led by Daniel Berger-Jones of Cambridge Historical Tours.

“Our vision for the state is to be the best, and Kendall really represents that,” said Yvonne Hao, Massachusetts secretary of economic development. “When I went to DC to talk to folks about why Massachusetts should win some of these grants, they said, ‘You already have Kendall, that’s what we’re trying to get the whole country to be like!’”

Hao started her talk by noting her personal connection to Kendall Square. She moved to Cambridge with her family in 2010 and has watched the neighborhood transform, with her kids frequenting the old and new restaurants and shops around town.

The crux of Hao’s talk was to remind attendees they had more to celebrate than KSA’s anniversary. Massachusetts was recently named the recipient of two major federal grants that will fuel the state’s innovation work. One of those grants, from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), designated the state an “Investor Catalyst Hub” to accelerate innovation around health care. The other, which came through the federal CHIPS and Science Act, will allow the state to establish the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub to advance microelectronics jobs, workforce training opportunities, and investment in the region’s advanced manufacturing.

Hao recalled making the pitch for the grants, which could collectively amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in funding over time.

“The pitch happened in Kendall Square because Kendall highlights everything magical about Massachusetts — we have our universities, MIT, we have our research institutions, nonprofits, small businesses, and great community members,” Hao said. “We were hoping for good weather because we wanted to walk with government officials, because when you walk around Kendall, you see the art, you see the coffee shops, you see the people bumping into each other and talking, and you see why it’s so important that this one square mile of geography become the hub they were looking for.”

Hao is also part of work to put together the state’s newest economic development plan. She said the group’s tier one priorities are transportation and housing, but listed a number of other areas where she hopes Massachusetts can improve.

“We can be an amazing, strong economy that’s mission-driven and innovation-driven with all kinds of jobs for all kinds of people, and at the same time an awesome community that loves each other and has great food and small businesses and looks out for each other, that looks diverse just like this room,” Hao said. “That’s the story we want to tell.”

After the historical tour and the debut of a video explaining the origins of the KSA, attendees fast-forwarded into the future with a panel discussion on the impact and implications of generative AI.

“I think the paradigm shift we’re seeing with generative AI is going to be as transformative as the internet, perhaps even more so because the pace of adoption is much faster now,” said Microsoft’s Soundar Srinivasan.

The panel also featured Jennat Jounaidi, a student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and member of Innovators for Purpose, a nonprofit that seeks to empower young people from historically marginalized groups to become innovators.

“I’m interested to see how generative AI shapes my upbringing as well as the lives of future generations, and I think it’s a pivotal moment to decide how we can best develop and incorporate AI into all of our lives,” Jounaidi said.

Panelists noted that today’s concerns around AI are important, such as its potential to perpetuate inequality and amplify misinformation. But they also discussed the technology’s potential to drive advances in areas like sustainability and health care.

“I came to Kendall Square to do my PhD in AI at MIT back when the internet was called the ARPA-Net… so a while ago,” said Jeremy Wertheimer SM ’89, PhD ’96. “One of the dreams I had back then was to create a program to read all biology papers. We’re not quite there yet, but I think we’re on the cusp, and it’s very exciting.

Above all else, the panelists characterized AI as an opportunity. Despite all that’s been accomplished in Kendall Square to date, the prevailing feeling at the event was excitement for the future.

“Generative AI is giving us chance to stop working in siloes,” Jounaidi said. “Many people in this room go back to their companies and think about corporate responsibility, and I want to expand that to creating shared value in companies by seeking out the community and the people here. I think that’s important, and I’m excited to see what comes next.”

Robert Robinson Taylor’s impressive legacy straddles two institutions. There’s MIT, where he studied architecture and became the Institute’s first African American graduate; and then there is Tuskegee University, originally the Tuskegee Institute, where Taylor spent most of his career, heading the architecture department of the historically Black college, helping to shape its educational philosophy that drew some inspiration from MIT’s, and designing and helping to build many of the buildings on the Tuskegee campus.

While there have been ongoing links between the two campuses, just in the last year leaders and students in both places have been working to build, extend, and deepen that connection.

Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee’s founder, recruited Taylor shortly after his MIT graduation in 1892, and apart from a brief three-year interlude, Taylor remained there until his retirement, having become the nation’s first accredited Black architect. During that period, he designed 48 buildings that formed the core of the campus, and which were built by the students and faculty members themselves. Forty of those buildings, including the chapel and the science building, remain in use on the campus today, and have been designated as national historic landmarks.

“There are such essential resonances between the two institutions, beyond the shared history, in terms of where they are today,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, chair of MIT’s Department of Architecture, who has been actively pursuing a deeper engagement between the two in collaboration with Kwesi Daniels, head of Tuskegee’s architecture department.

Among other things, MIT’s environment in a major urban area shapes much of the focus of its architectural design work, while the very rural Tuskegee University “has a deep connection to its physical history, which forms a large part of the teaching in its architecture department,” de Monchaux says. “In terms of what the two campuses can provide each other, it seemed a natural fit at the architectural level” for the two to cultivate greater connections.

“Mens et manus”

Connecting back to the inspiration Taylor received from MIT’s longstanding motto “mens et manus,” referring to education both the mind and the hand, Daniels says that as the two institutions explore ways of expanding the connections between their campuses, “one of the things that really stood out for me was MIT’s model of educating the mind and the hand, and Tuskegee’s model of educating the head, the hand, and the heart.” As for that “heart” component, he says, “there’s a long lineage of work that Tuskegee is engaged in where the ‘heart’ was taking the knowledge that was on campus and pouring it out into the community surrounding the campus, to encourage new opportunities that would not normally be prevalent, by leveraging the resources that Tuskegee gets access to.”

MIT itself has also increasingly been using the phrase “mind, hand, and heart” in much of its own internal communications, emphasizing the importance of the human connections in a balanced education.

Daniels says “We’re really excited” about increasing interactions between the two institutions. “What I love about this is that it’s something that I wanted to see happen for a long time, and to see it actually taking place now, to see students benefiting, and for all of us being able to have this conversation about what education looks like.”

In November 2022, MIT held an event honoring Taylor’s legacy, and featuring Taylor’s great-granddaughter Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior advisor to President Barack Obama and now serves as CEO of the Obama Foundation. Jarrett brought Taylor’s MIT diploma, which family members had recently found, and which is now prominently displayed in the new MIT Museum, on loan from the family.

Now, a new program of exchange visits between the campuses has begun. This year, a group of students from Tuskegee came to the MIT campus for a week, to learn about digital fabrication techniques and entrepreneurship in the Department of Architecture and MITdesignX, the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) innovation program led by Faculty Director Svafa Grönfeldt. Then, a group of MIT architecture students, faculty, and staff spent a week on the Tuskegee campus, learning about the preservation of historic buildings, and about the strong connection between theoretical analysis and practical applications that is embodied in the Tuskegee curriculum, as Taylor envisioned it.

“Taylor brought his experience from MIT to Tuskegee, and it formed part of the DNA of that institution,” de Monchaux says. Taylor himself spoke of that inspiration: At an event honoring MIT’s 50th anniversary, he said that “some of the methods and plans of the Institute of Technology [MIT] have been transplanted to the Tuskegee Institute, and have flourished and grown there.”

A two-way exchange

Tuskegee University “focuses a lot on creating a home and a community for its students,” says Larry Sass, an MIT professor of design and computation in the architecture department who helped to organize the exchanges. The group of Tuskegee students who traveled to MIT “can bring back a lot of the digital fabrication techniques that we teach, a lot of the computing techniques that we teach.” As for the MIT students visiting Tuskegee, programs in historic preservation and conservation do not exist at MIT, so the visits allow MIT students to understand important techniques in an important historical context; as Sass relates, “most MIT students know nothing about the civil rights movement, and when we travel to Alabama, we’ve been learning a lot about the aftermath of the civil rights movement, because it’s so well documented there.”

In addition, Sass says, because much of the Tuskegee campus was built by the students themselves, and that kind of hands-on work continues, “as architecture students they learn to physically produce the things they are learning about.”

Timothy Hyde, an MIT professor of architectural history and one of the leaders of the exchange program, points out that at Tuskegee, “historically that was the case, where literally the architecture students made the campus. They dug the clay, they fired the bricks, they designed the buildings with Robert Taylor, and then they built the buildings, and then they would have classes in them … There was always this back and forth between the physical architecture of the campus and the kind of thinking and the abstract knowledge of the campus.”

Hyde says that for the MIT group that went to Tuskegee, one goal was “trying to learn about and understand both the pedagogical and curricular structure and organizational structure of Tuskegee University, which is very distinct.” The architecture program there, he says, “is really woven in with many other fields, it’s quite interdisciplinary in its thinking,” and highly involved in its community. For example, they learned about a student project that involved designing a mobile library for the local county, built from a converted school bus, that will now provide a library service that can travel from school to school.

“We hope to dive much more into learning about how an institution can carry out this kind of intensive community engagement,” Hyde says. He adds that MIT also can learn from the way Tuskegee works with a campus many of whose buildings constitute a national historic site. “That has direct relevance to me and to my department, given the fact that in two years [the architecture department] is going to move into the Metropolitan Warehouse,” which is also a designated historical building. This move “is itself an adaptive reuse project, a historic preservation project that is trying to take an existing building and rather than tear it down, transform it into something useful for the 21st century.” Tuskegee is wrestling with similar issues now, for example in renovating its science building, where George Washington Carver worked, to update its lab facilities while preserving its history.

Building and expanding

Three of the Tuskegee students, Adeleke Ambali, Jordan Houser, and Kiana Wilcher, who came on that exchange visit in January ended up applying to and participating in MIT’s Summer Research Program (MSRP), a highly competitive program for college students from around the country to come to MIT for nine weeks and work on projects with MIT faculty members. “That felt like some validation” for the exchange program, says Lauren Schuller, the diversity, equity, and belonging officer in MIT’s architecture department, who helped organize the events. It showed “that they had a positive experience, because they wanted to come back and spend the whole summer here … And they really got the whole MIT experience,” including a chance to get to know faculty members and departments that they were interested in.

De Monchaux says that “architecture in the 21st century faces essential tasks across many different contexts and communities; our partnership with Tuskegee gives our students a broader and more essential picture of what it is to build places today.” After the MIT group’s visit to Tuskegee last April, he says, many students “reported separately that it was one of the most significant experiences of their MIT degree.”

Daniels adds that while the initiative for the collaboration came from the architecture departments of both schools, the hope is that interactions will grow and expand to encompass many other disciplines as well, including public health, computation, and the two institutions’ business schools. “The only way we’ll find real solutions to the problems we have is to think in interdisciplinary ways, because none of these problems are borne out of one discipline, and definitely cannot be solved by just a myopic approach. We all have a piece of the puzzle.”

Toward that end, Schuller says, MIT is putting together a steering committee “to not only determine what the partnership and programming will look like within the department of architecture, but also to be sort of a clearinghouse for other potential collaborations across MIT.” Already, a further exchange of visits between groups of students and faculty from the two schools is planned for next January.

Reflecting on Taylor’s life and impact, and the influence that MIT had on him and that he passed along, Daniels says “I just hope that we, through this type of exchange, can duplicate that experience exponentially with students, through the pipeline that was created with MIT and Tuskegee over 140 years ago.”

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 Science Center’s A.SK Social Science Award, one of the most highly endowed international awards in the social sciences.

Acemoglu received the award for “his vastly influential work on, among others, the decisive role of institutions in capitalist economies, on the forces of states and societies which must negotiate a balance in order to ensure liberty, and on the uses and risks of automation.” 

In announcing the award, the international jury praised Acemoglu’s fundamental contributions to labor economics, macroeconomics, and political economy.

“As his research moves across both political science and economics, Daron Acemoglu has become a leading expert on the determinants of economic growth,” the international jury wrote.

“I am incredibly honored and humbled to have been selected as the recipient of the A.SK Social Science Award,” Acemoglu says. “The WZB has been unwavering in its support for and promotion of high-quality social science, and I consider myself lucky and privileged to have been included in their illustrious roster of previous recipients.”

Acemoglu began teaching at MIT in 1993, and has been honored throughout his distinguished career for his work in macroeconomics, political economy, labor economics, development economics, and economic theory. Acemoglu co-leads the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative, alongside MIT economists Professor David Autor and Professor Simon Johnson.

Earlier this year, Acemoglu published “Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,” co-written with Simon Johnson. Acemoglu has warned of the potential social, economic, and political harm of allowing AI to go unregulated.

The A.SK Social Science award is endowed with 100,000 euros. Acemoglu will receive the award at a livestreamed ceremony in Berlin on Nov. 14.

Past recipients of the award include MIT economist Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), who received the honor in 2015.

It is widely recognized that the period in the early 1970s in which Salvador Allende was president of Chile was a moment of political innovation, when people thought they could bring about socialist transformation peacefully and within existing democratic institutions.

“People thought that this would be a political third way,” says Eden Medina, an associate professor in MIT’s Program in Society, Technology, and Society.

Ultimately, a military coup brought a premature end to Chilean democracy and resulted in Allende’s death. But it’s a period of political and cultural history to which Medina has dedicated extensive research. As the culmination of that work, Medina is co-curating a museum exhibition, “How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design” (in Spanish, “Cómo diseñar una revolución: La vía chilena al diseño”). The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the military coup. It’s the most extensive presentation of the history of graphic and industrial design during the Allende period.

“It has really been a collective effort to bring this history to the Chilean public and also to a larger international public,” says Medina.

The exhibition opened at the Centro Cultural La Moneda, the cultural center of the Chilean presidential palace, beginning last month. Medina is co-curating the exhibition with Professor Hugo Palmarola and Professor Pedro Ignacio Alonso of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The exhibit will be accompanied by a book, which will be available in English and Spanish.

“The research we’ve been doing shows that this innovative political project opened the door to other kinds of innovation, including artistic innovation, and innovation in the areas of design, science, and technology,” says Medina.

Medina says the exhibition is bringing a new interpretation of the Popular Unity period and the practice of Chile’s political transformation. The exhibition features 350 pieces, including a full-scale reconstruction of the Cybersyn Operations Room, a pioneering project in cybernetics. The operations room was designed by the Industrial Design Area of the Chilean State Technology Institute between 1972 and 1973, and some of its original designers — Gui Bonsiepe, Fernando Shultz, Rodrigo Walker, and Pepa Foncea — collaborated in the reconstruction.

“By showing these designed projects, whether it’s the creation of a spoon to measure powdered milk or a poster to get people to volunteer their labor, we’re seeing what people did and how they were trying to figure out ways of bringing about socialist transformation,” says Medina. “The exhibition explores how those in the past looked to graphic and industrial design to create collective action, democratize knowledge and music, reduce technological dependency, improve child nutrition, and manage the economy.”

Regina Rodríguez Covarrubias, director of Centro Cultural La Moneda, says it’s the center’s most important exhibition of the year.

“Within the framework of the 50 years since the civil-military coup, this exhibition speaks to us from a little-explored place, beyond the trauma of the civil-military coup and the dictatorship: It allows us to know and appreciate an avant-garde Chile that used its creative resources to democratize culture, educate, and build bonds of coexistence in favor of equity and innovation,” says Rodríguez Covarrubias.

After three years of collaboration between MIT and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Medina is excited to see what visitors experience when they step inside.

“When they go into the space of the Cybersyn Operations Room, they’ll see that the space isn’t a fantasy, it was something that people built. It was futuristic, but it was also built under conditions of constraint. And you see how people were really creative when working under these conditions. They built something that was cutting edge using simple technologies. Even a low-tech space can be futuristic, and that is generative as we think about sustainable design today and the potential need to make better use of older technologies,” says Medina.

Student support

The project involved MIT graduate students from the Department of Architecture and undergraduate students from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Medina says the project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the students, which she says was an opportunity for them to collaborate with the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) on a public-facing project in the humanities.

She adds the exhibition is an example of SHASS’s international reach, and how the humanities can collaborate with engineering and architecture to build historical objects and environments from a major historical moment.

“MIT provides a way of doing the humanities that I think is very unique. It allows students to take their technical training and their propensity to build and marry it with things like archival research and historical interpretation, and bring those skills together, in this case, for public communication,” says Medina.

MIT students working on the project say it’s been a transformative experience, one that uniquely combined their skills across disciplines.

Alissa Serfozo, a designer and master of architecture candidate at MIT, joined the project in autumn 2022 as a researcher and then editorial assistant for the exhibition edited volume. She conducted research on the posters designed during the time period that were ultimately recreated as artifacts in the exhibition.

“Our approach was to think critically about designed objects as political instruments. We considered the posters’ entire life cycle, from production to dissemination, observing the proximity of design and politics during this historical period,” she says. “Many of these posters live in private archives and are not often visible to the public. I’m thrilled to see the collection materialize in the final product of the exhibit.”

Serfozo says learning about the kinds of graphic design and printing used in that period inspired her to further her own expertise in the field.

“Throughout learning about the history of printing in 19th- and 20th-century Chile, I simultaneously became interested in that practice. I took cyanotype classes at the Student Art Association and did a self-study in silkscreen printing,” she says.

Azania Umoja, also a master’s student studying architecture, worked as editorial assistant for the project.

“For me, I’m very interested in work that redefines what architecture is and what it means to be an architect. Seeing the intersection between design and this important political movement in Chile’s history was really fascinating to me,” Umoja says.

Rihn Hong ’23 and Josh Noguera ’23, who both graduated in the spring with bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering, worked on getting the logic and electronic recreation of the operations room functional. They spent time in Chile this summer putting the final touches on the exhibit. Noguera says one of his favorite parts of the project has been the intersection between historical research and technology.

“Working with the museum curators in Chile has been incredibly fulfilling in terms of getting experience, working with other people, and other teams,” says Noguera. “And now with recreating the system, a lot of interesting challenges that both Rihn and I have is the discussion of what should be omitted, or striking a balance between user experience in the exhibit and historical accuracy.”

Mariana González Medrano MArch ’23 completed her MIT master’s in architecture this spring, and was responsible for creating some of the early plans for the design of the operations room. It’s hexagonal and measures 72 square meters with seven fiberglass armchairs equipped with buttons for remotely controlling screens on the room’s walls.

One of the biggest challenges, she says, was the discrepancy she often found in the historical documents about what was planned and what was realized.

“And those discrepancies really lie in those small details of what angle do the walls curve in, exactly how high is the ceiling going to be, where does this thing exactly connect to the wall,” she says. “All these things end up having a large impact on the room. And every document carries its own story and vision of what the room is meant to do or convey in terms of how every single object and every detail relates to each other.”

Coming full circle

For Medina, the exhibit is the completion of years of work and research. Part of the work she’s doing to build and display this exhibit was part of her dissertation at MIT.

“If you had told my grad student-self that one day my dissertation research would be on display as part of a major historical anniversary in Chile, in the cultural center of the presidential palace, I just wouldn’t have believed you,” she says. “It is such an opportunity to communicate history of technology research to a broad public and help them see the relationship of politics and technological design and to do it in a different kind of way. Not only to do it through a written text, which is how historians often work, but to actually build the space and invite members of the public to step inside. That’s really special.”

Professor Hugo Palmarola considers this to be one of the most important cases of design in Latin America, since it is historically located at a fundamental turning point for development models in the region.

“The pieces selected for this exhibition were designed at the time to create new ways of life and a new political, social, and economic world. In this regard, we as curators think that these pieces configure a truly unprecedented project, which may have important implications in global debates and global studies of design, visual and material culture, technology, and curatorship,” he says.

Professor Pedro Ignacio Alonso says the making of the exhibition was not just a way to show results of a research project, but also a different way to keep learning about the history of the period, through its designed objects.

“It is, as it were, a different research format in the careful displaying of both original pieces from archives, and our reconstructions of objects that have disappeared long time ago, that now reemerge within our curatorial work,” he says.

After the exhibit closes in January, Medina says it is designed to travel, though there are no specific plans yet for where it might go.

Medina says her hope is the exhibit will bring to light the way people tackled some of the core challenges of society during this unique historical moment, so that it might inspire new ways of approaching similar challenges today.

“How do you improve education, nutrition? How do you raise the standard of living for the poorest members of society? How do you get people to participate politically? All of these questions are still relevant today. While the solutions people developed 50 years ago are not the same solutions that we need today, we can still learn from them and find inspiration in how design and technology in Chile foregrounded social, political, and human values,” says Medina.

Support for the project was provided by the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; MISTI; the Program in Science, Technology, and Society; the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; the Centro Cultural La Moneda; the Chilean Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation; the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage; and the Goethe Institut Chile.

In a celebratory convergence of innovation and global impact, the 2023 Solve Challenge Finals, hosted by MIT Solve, unfolded to welcome the 2023 Solver Class. These teams, resolute in their commitment to addressing Solve’s 2023 Global Challenges and rooted in advancing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, serve as the perfect examples of the impact technology can have when addressed toward social good.

To set the tone of the day, Cynthia Barnhart, MIT provost, called for bold action in service to the world, and Hala Hanna, MIT Solve executive director, urged the new Solver teams and attendees to harness the power of technology for benevolent purposes. “Humans have lived with the dichotomy of technology since the dawn of time. Today we find ourselves at another juncture with generative AI, and we have choices to make. So, what if we choose that every line of code heals, and every algorithm uplifts, and every device includes?” she said during the opening plenary, Tech-Powered and Locally-Led: Solutions for Global Progress.

Global, intergenerational, and contextual change for good

This year’s Solve Challenge Finals served as a global platform for reflection. Majid Al Suwaidi, director-general of COP28, shared the experiences that have shaped his approach to climate negotiation. He recounted a poignant visit to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-facilitated refugee camp housing 300,000 climate migrants. There he met a mother and her nine children. In a sprawling camp housing 300,000 people, scarcity was evident, with just one toilet for every 100 residents. “There are people who contribute nothing to the problem but are impacted the most,” Majid emphasized, stressing the need to prioritize those most affected by climate change when crafting solutions.

Moderator Lysa John, secretary-general of CIVICUS, steered the conversation toward Africa’s growing influence during her fireside chat with David Sengeh SM ’12, PhD ’16, chief minister of Sierra Leone, and Toyin Saraki, president of the Wellbeing Foundation. The African Union was recently named a permanent member of the G20. Saraki passionately advocated for Africa to assert itself: “I would like this to be more than just the North recognizing the South. This is the time now for us to bring African intelligence to the forefront. We have to bring our own people, our own data, our own resources.” She also called for an intergenerational shift, recognizing the readiness of the younger generation to lead.

Sengeh, who is 36 himself, emphasized that young people are natural leaders, especially in a nation where 70 percent of the population is youth. He challenged the status quo, urging society to entrust leadership roles to the younger generation.

Saraki praised Solve as a vital incubation hub, satisfying the need for contextual innovation while contributing to global progress. She views Solve as a marketplace of solutions to systemic weaknesses, drawing upon the diverse approaches of innovators both young and old. “That is the generation of intelligence that needs to grow, not just in Africa. Solve is amazing for that, it’s an investor’s delight,” she said.

Henrietta Fore, managing partner, chair, and CEO of Radiate Capital, Holsman International, shared an example of entrepreneurship catalyzed by country-level leaders, referencing India’s Swachh Bharat program aimed at promoting cleaner environments. The government initiative led to a burst of entrepreneurial activity, with women opening various shops for toilets and bathroom commodities. Fore highlighted the potential for companies to collaborate with countries on such programs, creating momentum and innovation.

Trust as capital

Trust was a prevalent theme throughout the event, from personal to business levels.

Johanna Mair, academic editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, asked Sarah Chandler, vice president of environment and supply chain innovation at Apple, for advice she may have for corporations and startups thinking about their holistic climate goals. Chandler emphasized the importance of trust that businesses must have that environmental goals can align with business goals, highlighting Apple’s 45 percent reduction in carbon footprint since 2015 and 65 percent revenue increase.

Neela Montgomery, board partner at Greycroft, discussed her initial skepticism around collaborating with large entities, seeking advice from Ilan Goldfajn, president of the Inter-American Development Bank. “Don’t be shy to come … take advantage of a multilateral bank … think about multilateral organizations as the ones to make connections. We can be your support commercially and financially, we could be your clients, and we could be your promoters,” said Goldfajn.

During a fireside chat among Janti Soeripto, president and CEO of Save the Children USA, and Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of Center for Countering Digital, Soeripto shared her belief that the most effective change comes from the country and local community level. She pointed to a contextual example of this where Save the Children invested in scaling a small Austrian ed-tech startup — Library for All. The partnership positively impacted literacy for other communities around the world by making literature more accessible.

There still exist major hurdles for small enterprises to enter the global market. Imran points to sclerosis and hesitancy to trust small-scale innovation as a roadblock to meaningful change. 

The final discussion of the closing plenary, Funding the Future: Scaling up Inclusive Impact, featured Fore; Mohammed Nanabhay, managing partner of Mozilla Ventures; and Alfred Ironside, vice president of communications at MIT, who asked the two panelists, “What do you [look for] when thinking about putting money into leaders and organizations who are on this mission to create impact and achieve scale?”

Beyond aligning principles with organizations, Nanabhay said that he looks for tenacity and, most importantly, trust in oneself. “Entrepreneurship is a long journey, it’s a hard journey — whether you’re on the for-profit side or the nonprofit side. It’s easy to say people should have grit, everyone says this. When the time comes and you’re struggling … you need to have the fundamental belief that what you’re working on is meaningful and that it’s going to make the world better.”

On an unusually cold day last February, pipes burst all over Massachusetts, including in the MIT Stratton Student Center (Building W20, affectionately called “The Stud” by students). There was widespread damage to the building, and despite many student group spaces being flooded with water, some still had salvageable items. At the time, the Undergraduate Association Sustainability team (UA Sustain) was called into action to see what items of furniture, computer equipment, and clothing could be saved and repurposed instead of being thrown into a landfill.

Cameron Dougal, a current UA Sustain co-chair, and Anushree Chaudhuri, a former co-chair, took time in the spring to lead the repurposing efforts of a plethora of items. Chaudhuri, from San Diego, California, and majoring in urban studies and planning and economics, and Dougal, from Springfield, Massachusetts, and majoring in urban science and planning with computer science, had little time to organize the student effort needed to clear out numerous club spaces.

Quickly, they took photos and inventoried a head-spinning list of usable items: 30 pieces of usable furniture, 20 large bags of club T-shirts, scuba gear, photography equipment (including darkroom chemicals), tables, beanbag chairs, computer monitors, keyboards, printers, electronic drum sets, guitars, pots and pans, microwave ovens, bookshelves, office supplies, clothing, theater and dance costumes, storage crates, magazine racks, bicycles, and items they referred to as “bad art.”

Groups clearing out their spaces found other treasures. Lecture Series Committee (LSC) members found a copy of a letter sent to Albert Einstein in 1950, inviting the renowned physicist to speak at MIT, as well as a reply from his assistant. “We found other interesting things, such as signed Star Trek posters and recordings of Winston Churchill Jr. [the former U.K. prime minister’s son] and T. S. Eliot,” says Heidi Durresi, LSC chair.

On a grand scale, though, the effort was daunting. “We found so much stuff, I asked my friends on the rowing team to help load the U-Haul truck we rented. We estimate we saved about 50 cubic meters and about 1,000 pounds, which doesn’t include the 30-plus pieces of furniture, from going into a landfill. It was hard to decide what to save and what to get rid of, but through our Trash2Treasure program, we’ll sell many of the items we found. Any money we make cycles back into the UA Sustain Reuse budget or is donated to charity,” says Dougal.

Chaudhuri noted that they had just a week and a half to clean out the floor in concert with staff from Student Organizations, Leadership, and Engagement and the Campus Activities Complex. But, because UA Sustain has extensive experience managing the logistics of similar projects, she knew that this was a way her committee could help. “It was like going through the layered sediments of club history at MIT. We just kept finding more and more things. Our main goal was to keep as much as possible out of landfills,” she says.

Once Chaudhuri and Dougal had everything usable out of W20, they began the outreach part of their plan. They emailed dorms and fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups about taking the furniture. Unclaimed items were donated to the MIT Furniture Exchange. They worked with MIT Recycling to move items to their storage space — to be sold (for reasonable prices) at the Trash2Treasure sale this fall. Clothing items deemed unsuitable for sale were bagged and sent to a textile recycling facility. Anything remaining was donated to local area thrift stores — all in an effort to keep items out of landfills.

“We really couldn’t have done it without the help of the other club teams. So, a shout-out to them! They put in a lot of overtime on this project,” says Chaudhuri. “We also had the help of administration from the Student Organizations, Leadership and Engagement office.”

“We hope this effort opens people’s eyes as to what can be reused. We hope the MIT community will remember that things don’t have to be thrown away. We’d love to see everyone form greener habits,” says Dougal.

Chaudhuri is currently applying to master’s of city planning programs and Dougal also plans to pursue a master’s of city planning — when they graduate in 2024 and 2025, respectively. In the meantime, they will continue looking for sustainability projects with the UA and spreading awareness about the great work they do.

Growing up as a shy kid in Palestine, Joseph Michael didn’t have much exposure to computer science. As a result, he couldn’t see how it applied to his life. But in 2018, at the age of 14, Michael joined the Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow (MEET), a three-year, Jerusalem-based program that brings together promising young Palestinian and Jewish Israeli students to learn about computer science, entrepreneurship, and leadership. MEET’s mission is to empower students to positively impact the Middle East by showing them the value of collaboration as they go through a fast-paced curriculum.

Over the next three summers, Michael was part of a MEET team that aimed to teach disadvantaged youth how to fix outdated and broken computers. The children, many of whom were like Michael and lacked access to technology, learned to see the machines as highly useful tools that could be broken down into component parts. In the end, they walked away with their very own computers.

The experience helped Michael discover a passion for expanding computer literacy. Through it, he built lifelong friendships with people from different backgrounds. Today, Michael works as an instructor and mentor teaching students as young as 7 about coding and entrepreneurship.

Michael’s story epitomizes the vision MEET’s founders laid out when they started the program as students at MIT. Back in 2004, in response to another spate of violence between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, siblings Anat Binur PhD ’11 and Yaron Binur ’05 wanted to broaden Middle Eastern youth’s perspectives while equipping them with the skills to make an impact in the region.

The founders’ own transformations since coming to MIT shaped their approach.

“We saw the big role that networks played in our lives,” Anat says. “The people you know change the way you look at the world, how you define a problem, and the resources you have to solve those problems. At MIT, we were interacting with people we would’ve never had a chance to meet otherwise, and we saw how they were redefining the way we looked at the world and opening up new opportunities. Most Palestinians and Israeli Jews never have a chance to meet each other. If they do meet, it’s in the worst of circumstances. Therefore they aren’t in each other’s lives, and they see the problems in one dimensional ways.”

That insight has blossomed into an impactful program over the last 19 years. Today more than 800 students have gone through the MEET program, which is taught by a cohort of MIT student instructors and local professionals each summer. Although most MEET alumni are still under 30, they have gone on to spearhead conflict resolution and advocacy work, found successful social and technology startups, contribute to cancer research, and break down barriers in the investment community. Thirty MEET alumni have been accepted to Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology; 13 have been accepted to MIT; and another two have been accepted to Harvard University.

But the most important output of MEET is harder to quantify. It involves broadening student perspectives by exposing them to people and experiences that they say have changed the course of their lives.

“The idea is to create a future network of leaders that would understand the advantages of working together and stay in each other’s networks, so they can have huge impact on the economy, politics, and social organizations in a positive way in both communities,” Anat says.

A program with a purpose

Yaron was an undergraduate and Anat was about to start her PhD at MIT when violence in their home country of Israel compelled them to start a program to promote change in the region. They started a student group at MIT and began recruiting classmates to travel to Jerusalem that summer to start the MEET program, raising money as they went.

After a few years, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) began organizing the MIT student portion of the program by recruiting, training, and supporting student travel to Israel each year. The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) also provided support.

As the MEET program grew, so did its reputation. Today it regularly gets about 1,500 applicants for each new cohort. Every year it selects 120 new students, split evenly between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, and between boys and girls.

After the first two summers, students continue working together in an afterschool program that takes place both in person and virtually. They learn how to code and start a business — what the founders describe as a “mini MBA” — along with soft skills like teamwork, leadership, and empathy. The last two summers are more advanced, with students splitting into startup teams and building solutions to problems in their communities.

“It’s intense and in-depth, and that’s intentional,” Yaron says. “We feel in order for them to form long lasting relationships and understanding, it has to be something more than a couple of days or weeks. We also feel giving them these unique skills puts them in a position to succeed in the future.”

Many students stay involved with MEET after they graduate. Some continue their startup projects and go on to raise private funding for their ventures. The MEET network also continues providing mentorship and support for students as they continue their academic and professional careers.

MIT student instructors — including undergraduates and graduates from every school at MIT — also often stay involved after their summer in Jerusalem. This summer, former instructor Ted Golfinopoulos SM ’09, PhD ’14 flew to Jerusalem for a single day to experience the MEET student graduation. It was his 16th time attending the ceremony.

Junior Jocelyn Zhu served as an instructor last summer and returned this summer to see her former students.

“I don’t think you can get that experience anywhere else,” says Zhu, who currently serves as a MISTI-MEET liaison. “The month you’re there, your entire life is about the students and learning how to communicate across boundaries, which I think is super relevant not only there, but also in the U.S. in terms of handling political polarization. I found it to be very impactful.”

Leaders and changemakers

Shayma Sharif graduated from the MEET program in 2008. The experience was so meaningful for her that she later served as a MEET instructor and currently sits on MEET’s board. In 2019, she became one of the few female Palestinian venture capitalists in the Middle East when she joined the prominent Silicon Valley-based investment firm NFX. The following year she landed on Forbes Israel’s 30 under 30 list, and she continues to serve as a role model and mentor for female students interested in technology and entrepreneurship.

As MEET’s alumni base grows, the founders want to leverage that network more intentionally to expand the program’s impact. In collaboration with MISTI, MEET will be launching a new leadership program for both alumni of MEET and MISTI programs in the Middle East.

“I think this is an important time to accelerate and keep pushing forward,” Yaron says.

The founders are humbled by the impact of MEET so far, but say it has not yet achieved its ultimate mission of bringing peace to the Middle East.

Still, there are moments when the program’s progress sinks in for the founders. For Anat, one of those moments came this summer, as she stepped into the auditorium where 300 students gathered for graduation.

“There were about 600 Jewish Israeli and Palestinian family members in there,” Anat recalls. “That is really rare. Palestinians and Israeli Jews don’t sit in the same auditorium, or meet up, or share a program with their children. I started thinking back to 2004, when we started with 30 students. Now we have these kids who have spent three intense years together, learning, working, and recognizing each other’s capabilities in ways that go way beyond their nationality.”

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 she is not “Kanaka ʻŌiwi,” of native Hawaiian descent, she is proud to trace her family’s history to the time of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 19th century. Grande is now a PhD candidate in MIT’s HASTS (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society) program, and part of her dissertation tracks how Hawaiian culture and people’s relationship with the land has evolved throughout time.

“The fondest memories I have are camping on the north shore every summer with my friends,” says Grande. “I loved being in ‘ke kai’ (the sea) and ‘ma uka,’ (inland, in the mountains) with my friends when I was younger. It was just pure fun exploring ‘ʻāina’ like that.” “‘Āina” in the Hawaiian language is often defined as “land,” but is understood to the people of Hawaiʻi as “that which feeds.”

“Now that I’m older,” Grande adds, “I’m connecting the dots and realizing how much knowledge about the complex systems of ‘ahupuaʻa’ [traditional Hawaiian divisions of land that extend from the mountains to the sea], I actually gained through these experiences.”

Grande recently completed a year of fieldwork in Hawaiʻi where she volunteered with land-based, or ‘āina-based organizations. In the movement to restore ‘āina to “momona,” or  “fertile and abundant lands,” the land and the people who serve as its stewards are of equal importance.

“I’m looking at how people who are not Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, or native Hawaiian, by descent can participate in this kind of restoration, and what it means for both Kanaka ‘Ōiwi and non-Kanaka ‘Ōiwi to participate in it,” says Grande, who herself descends from immigrants of other island nations. “Some of my ancestors were born and raised in Hawaiʻi before the U.S. subjected Hawaiʻi as a state and territory, meaning that some of them were Hawaiian Kingdom subjects. While, I am not Kanaka ʻŌiwi by lineage, some of my ‘ohana nui (extended family), from these same ancestors, are Kanaka ʻŌiwi. I’m writing about how being Hawaiian, from a Hawaiian sovereignty standpoint, is not just about race and ethnicity. When Hawaiʻi was a sovereign nation, Hawaiian citizenship was never afforded on the basis of race alone. It was also based on your lifelong commitment to ‘āina and the people of Hawaiʻi.”

The project is personal to Grande, who describes both the content and the process of writing it as part of her healing journey. She hopes to lay the groundwork for others who are “hoaʻāina,” or “those who actively care for ʻāina,” in Hawaiʻi, but not Kanaka ʻŌiwi to better articulate their identities and foster a deeper connection with the ʻāina and the “kaiāulu,” or “community,” they love and actively care for.

Returning home

Grande has spent her academic career on the East Coast, first at Brown University, where she received a degree in science, technology, and society, and now at MIT in the HASTS program. She swam competitively through her second year of college, and had earlier represented Hawaiʻi at the 2012 Oceania Games in New Caledonia. Once she stopped swimming, Grande first used her newfound time to travel the world. Tired of this transient lifestyle, she realized she was more interested in exploring her connection to land in a more rooted way.

“Moving around, especially as a college student, it’s very hard to grow things,” says Grande. “People are a lot like plants. You really just need to let plants do their thing in place. We do really well and we thrive when we can be connected to place.”

Grande started by founding the Ethnobotany Society at Brown to explore the relationship people have to plants. With the group she organized nature walks, collaborated with local farms, and connected it to the history she was learning in class.

Still, the East Coast never quite felt like home to Grande. When she started planning for the fieldwork portion of her program, she envisioned spending half the year in New England and half in Hawaiʻi. But she soon realized how important it was for both her research and herself to dedicate everything to Hawai’i.

“When I came back, it just felt so right to be back home,” says Grande. “The feeling in your naʻau — your ‘gut’ — of knowing that you have to contribute to Hawaiʻi is very powerful, and I think a lot of people here understand what that means. It’s kind of like a calling.”

Hoaʻāina, community, family

Once Grande made the decision to return home for her field work, she says everything fell into place.

“I knew that I wanted to do something close to my heart. It’s a huge privilege because I was able to come home and learn more about myself and my family and how we are connected to Hawaiʻi,” she says.

During her year of fieldwork, Grande learned how hoaʻāina cultivate spaces where the community can can work alongside one another to plant traditional food and medicinal crops, control invasive species, and more. She wasn’t just an observer, either. As much as Grande learned from an academic perspective, her personal growth has been intertwined with the entire process.

“The most interesting part was that all the hoaʻāina I volunteered with helped me to understand my place back home,” says Grande. “They were my informants but also — this usually happens with anthropologists — people become your friends. The hoaʻāina I volunteered with treated me like family. They also got to know some of my family members, who joined me to volunteer at different sites. It’s sometimes hard to drop a hard line between what fieldwork is and what your personal life is because when you’re in the field, there’s so many events that are connected to your work. It was so fun and meaningful to write about the ʻāina and people I consider my community and family.”

The movement doesn’t start or end with Grande’s dissertation. Pursuing this project has given her the language to articulate her own relationship with ‘āina, and she hopes it will empower others to reexamine how they exist in relation to land.

After completing her program, Grande intends to stay in Hawaiʻi and continue philanthropy work while contributing to the movement of ʻāina momona.

“We want the land to live and to keep a relationship with the land. That’s the emotional part. I have a ‘kuleana,’ (duty and responsibility) to everything that I learned while growing up, including the ʻāina and ‘kaiāulu,’ (community) who raised me. The more you learn, there’s so much that you want to protect about the culture and this ‘āina.”

When Aya Khalifa came to MIT from Egypt for her master’s degree in chemical engineering, she adapted well to a new educational system thanks to class 10.MBC (Math Boot Camp for Engineers). This online resource was developed by the MIT Digital Learning Lab (DLL) and the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering for first-year graduate students who might need a refresher on the math skills needed for their core classes. 

“It exposed me to different ways of solving problems,” Khalifa says, adding that the resource was a “huge gain” for her academic progress. She initially took the course during the summer before her program officially started, but she also used Math Boot Camp for Engineers to revisit concepts throughout the semester. 

This online MIT resource is now also available as a massive open online course (MOOC) to any learner in the world. Through serving learners on MIT campus and online, the DLL advances quality digital learning initiatives at the Institute and extends MIT’s teaching and knowledge globally.

Digital learning on campus and beyond 

The DLL, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and MIT’s academic departments, is composed of academic staff and postdocs who collaborate on digital learning innovations. With their combined subject-matter expertise of their respective departments and instructional design innovation, DLL staff promote the latest findings in the learning sciences and educational technologies to develop and update courses.

“The DLL team does so many cool things — creative, hands-on, and informed by the best evidence in teaching and learning,” says Christopher Capozzola, senior associate dean for open learning. “From bringing cutting-edge technologies and ideas into classroom teaching to working alongside faculty as thought partners in developing new courses, programs, and projects, they bring a unique academic and digital agility to every department at MIT.”

Over the last decade, the DLL has grown to encompass all aspects of online learning research and deployment. Faculty work closely with digital learning scientists to incorporate digital technologies into the design and teaching practices of MITx courses and MITx MicroMasters programs for everyone and on-campus courses for MIT students. MITx online courses embody the rigor and quality of MIT’s residential courses, and MicroMasters are credential-bearing programs that can help individuals fast-track and save on costs of their master’s degree. In trying to identify the most effective teaching methods, the Digital Learning Lab ultimately discovers how to better support online learners and MIT students. 

Khalifa says the material she learned in Math Boot Camp for Engineers was relevant to her core graduate courses, including classes 10.50 (Analysis of Transport Phenomena) and 10.65 (Chemical Reactor Engineering). “I didn’t struggle with solving mathematical equations when there was already new content to learn in the course itself,” she says.

This was the outcome the chemical engineering department hoped for when they first approached Joey Gu MS ’16, PhD ’19, lecturer and digital learning scientist in chemical engineering, about improving the first semester experience for graduate students. Gu collaborated with departmental leadership, faculty, and graduate students to develop the first iteration of 10.MBC for summer 2020. Today, Math Boot Camp for Engineers is composed of six self-paced, self-guided, active-learning modules that cover different math topics. Students can take the modules in any order, depending on their needs, as identified by a diagnostic quiz. 

“I liked the option of doing the course in my own time and pace,” says Khalifa, adding that she thought the platform was “very user-friendly.” She found it helpful when concepts were divided into multiple short instructional videos, as opposed to hour-long lectures. 

Immediacy was key to her online learning experience. “I was not waiting for an instructor to give feedback,” Khalifa says. “I solved the problem right then and there, got the answer, and the explanation of the correct answer. I really appreciated that as a student.”

Sharing the latest advances in online learning

As some of the early pioneers and today’s leaders in designing open online courses, digital learning scientists publish research in the fields of learning science and their respective academic areas. They speak at conferences, lead workshops, and share their insights and innovations with MIT faculty and the learning community at large.

This semester, Mary Ellen Wiltrout PhD ’09 and Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’04 are serving as general chairs for the 2023 IEEE Learning with MOOCs Conference (LWMOOCs) taking place Oct. 11-13 at MIT. LWMOOCs is an international forum for academic and industry professionals to discuss the latest advances in MOOCs. This year, the conference will focus on blended learning with an emphasis on key topics such as strategies and opportunities for implementing open online courses in today’s world, using these courses to increase educational opportunities for more learners, especially those facing an opportunity gap, and impacting sustainability education. The conference is returning to campus for the first time since its inception in 2014.

“Ten years ago, we were talking about individual, stand-alone online courses, but now there’s more interest in exploring a variety of different educational spaces that are trying to use online modalities to make education more accessible, more affordable,” says Sandland, principal lecturer and digital learning scientist in materials science and engineering.

Participants will also have the opportunity to join workshops on AI in education and inclusive teaching, and learn evidence-based practices from experts developing and managing MOOCs  and other open online courses.

“We want to highlight case studies, research, and frameworks from those creating, running, or studying MOOCs for the community to learn from each other, driving the field to evolve,” says Wiltrout, who is the director of blended and online initiatives, lecturer, and digital learning scientist in biology and has managed over 100 course runs of MOOCs since 2013.

Through participation in LWMOOCs and their own research at the DLL, MIT’s digital learning scientists have been on the forefront of best practices for online teaching and innovations in online learning. “There’s a whole world of potential learners and potential knowledge to gain,” Sandland says. “The more we understand that, the more we can make rich learning experiences for all sorts of different learners.”

Someone’s prior beliefs about an artificial intelligence agent, like a chatbot, have a significant effect on their interactions with that agent and their perception of its trustworthiness, empathy, and effectiveness, according to a new study.

Researchers from MIT and Arizona State University found that priming users — by telling them that a conversational AI agent for mental health support was either empathetic, neutral, or manipulative — influenced their perception of the chatbot and shaped how they communicated with it, even though they were speaking to the exact same chatbot.

Most users who were told the AI agent was caring believed that it was, and they also gave it higher performance ratings than those who believed it was manipulative. At the same time, less than half of the users who were told the agent had manipulative motives thought the chatbot was actually malicious, indicating that people may try to “see the good” in AI the same way they do in their fellow humans.

The study revealed a feedback loop between users’ mental models, or their perception of an AI agent, and that agent’s responses. The sentiment of user-AI conversations became more positive over time if the user believed the AI was empathetic, while the opposite was true for users who thought it was nefarious.

“From this study, we see that to some extent, the AI is the AI of the beholder,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, a graduate student in the Fluid Interfaces group of the MIT Media Lab and co-lead author of a paper describing this study. “When we describe to users what an AI agent is, it does not just change their mental model, it also changes their behavior. And since the AI responds to the user, when the person changes their behavior, that changes the AI, as well.”

Pataranutaporn is joined by co-lead author and fellow MIT graduate student Ruby Liu; Ed Finn, associate professor in the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University; and senior author Pattie Maes, professor of media technology and head of the Fluid Interfaces group at MIT.

The study, published today in Nature Machine Intelligence, highlights the importance of studying how AI is presented to society, since the media and popular culture strongly influence our mental models. The authors also raise a cautionary flag, since the same types of priming statements in this study could be used to deceive people about an AI’s motives or capabilities.

“A lot of people think of AI as only an engineering problem, but the success of AI is also a human factors problem. The way we talk about AI, even the name that we give it in the first place, can have an enormous impact on the effectiveness of these systems when you put them in front of people. We have to think more about these issues,” Maes says.

AI friend or foe?

In this study, the researchers sought to determine how much of the empathy and effectiveness people see in AI is based on their subjective perception and how much is based on the technology itself. They also wanted to explore whether one could manipulate someone’s subjective perception with priming.

“The AI is a black box, so we tend to associate it with something else that we can understand. We make analogies and metaphors. But what is the right metaphor we can use to think about AI? The answer is not straightforward,” Pataranutaporn says.

They designed a study in which humans interacted with a conversational AI mental health companion for about 30 minutes to determine whether they would recommend it to a friend, and then rated the agent and their experiences. The researchers recruited 310 participants and randomly split them into three groups, which were each given a priming statement about the AI.

One group was told the agent had no motives, the second group was told the AI had benevolent intentions and cared about the user’s well-being, and the third group was told the agent had malicious intentions and would try to deceive users. While it was challenging to settle on only three primers, the researchers chose statements they thought fit the most common perceptions about AI, Liu says.

Half the participants in each group interacted with an AI agent based on the generative language model GPT-3, a powerful deep-learning model that can generate human-like text. The other half interacted with an implementation of the chatbot ELIZA, a less sophisticated rule-based natural language processing program developed at MIT in the 1960s.

Molding mental models

Post-survey results revealed that simple priming statements can strongly influence a user’s mental model of an AI agent, and that the positive primers had a greater effect. Only 44 percent of those given negative primers believed them, while 88 percent of those in the positive group and 79 percent of those in the neutral group believed the AI was empathetic or neutral, respectively.

“With the negative priming statements, rather than priming them to believe something, we were priming them to form their own opinion. If you tell someone to be suspicious of something, then they might just be more suspicious in general,” Liu says.

But the capabilities of the technology do play a role, since the effects were more significant for the more sophisticated GPT-3 based conversational chatbot.

The researchers were surprised to see that users rated the effectiveness of the chatbots differently based on the priming statements. Users in the positive group awarded their chatbots higher marks for giving mental health advice, despite the fact that all agents were identical.

Interestingly, they also saw that the sentiment of conversations changed based on how users were primed. People who believed the AI was caring tended to interact with it in a more positive way, making the agent’s responses more positive. The negative priming statements had the opposite effect. This impact on sentiment was amplified as the conversation progressed, Maes adds.

The results of the study suggest that because priming statements can have such a strong impact on a user’s mental model, one could use them to make an AI agent seem more capable than it is — which might lead users to place too much trust in an agent and follow incorrect advice.

“Maybe we should prime people more to be careful and to understand that AI agents can hallucinate and are biased. How we talk about AI systems will ultimately have a big effect on how people respond to them,” Maes says.

In the future, the researchers want to see how AI-user interactions would be affected if the agents were designed to counteract some user bias. For instance, perhaps someone with a highly positive perception of AI is given a chatbot that responds in a neutral or even a slightly negative way so the conversation stays more balanced.

They also want to use what they’ve learned to enhance certain AI applications, like mental health treatments, where it could be beneficial for the user to believe an AI is empathetic. In addition, they want to conduct a longer-term study to see how a user’s mental model of an AI agent changes over time.

This research was funded, in part, by the Media Lab, the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, Accenture, and KBTG.