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Presented by: Professor Robert Stickgold, Visiting Professor in Affective Computing at the MIT Media Lab, Professor of Psychiatry in Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
July 25th, 2023, 8:00am - 9:00am (ET)
The benefits that sleep confers on memory are surprisingly widespread. For simple procedural skills – how to ride a bicycle or distinguish different coins in one’s pocket – a night of sleep or an afternoon nap following learning leads to an absolute and dramatic improvement in performance. Sleep also stabilizes verbal memories, reducing their susceptibility to interference and decay, processes that all too easily lead to forgetting.
But the action of sleep can be more sophisticated than simply strengthening and stabilizing memories. It can lead to the selective retention of emotional memories, or even of emotional components of a scene, while allowing other memories and parts of scenes to be forgotten. It can extract the gist from a list of words, or the rules governing a complex probabilistic game. It can lead to insights ranging from finding the single word that logically connects three apparently unrelated words, to discovering an unexpected rule that allows for the more efficient solving of mathematical problems. It can facilitate the integration of new information into existing networks of related information and help infants learn artificial grammars. Disruptions of normal sleep in neurologic and psychiatric disorders can lead to a failure of these processes.
Dreams appear to be part of this ongoing memory processing, and can predict subsequent memory improvement. The NEXTUP (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities) model of dreaming proposes that dreaming aids complex problem solving by supporting divergent creativity, acting more by exploring a problem's "solution space" than by searching for the solution, itself.
Presented by: Dr. Kent Larson, PI of the City Science Group at the MIT Media Lab.
July 25th, 2023, 1:00pm - 2:00 pm (ET)
Cities account for 70% of global emissions: how they are designed, constructed, managed, and powered will lock in behavior, lifestyles, and future urban greenhouse gas emissions. Using the MIT-Kendall Square district of Cambridge as a case study, Kent Larson presents a series of urban interventions that could dramatically reduce emissions while simultaneously improving the residents' quality of life and economic opportunities. If taken to scale in cities worldwide, these hyper-local solutions would help address the grand challenges of our era.
Presented by: Manvitha Ponnapati and Allan Costa, Research Assistants in Molecular Machines at the MIT Media Lab
July 26th, 2023, 2:00pm - 3:00pm (ET)
The molecular engineering process is undergoing a profound revolution with the advent of AI models such as AlphaFold and large-scale language models. These transformative technologies are reshaping the field by enabling accurate prediction of protein structures, facilitating the generation of diverse sequence libraries, and unlocking the ability to predict molecular function. In this workshop, participants will gain insights into how AI is revolutionizing bioinformatics, drug discovery, genomics, and personalized medicine by using these AI models in interactive coding sessions. This workshop will also feature hands-on code demonstrations focused on building robust machine learning pipelines specifically for molecular engineering. No prior coding experience is necessary.
Presented by: Professor Kevin Esvelt, PI of Sculpting Evolution, MIT Media Lab
August 4, 2023, 11am - 12pm (ET)
Engineering biology increasingly depends on generating and leveraging trustworthy datasets using tools from many disciplines. In this workshop, we'll discuss new ways of experimentally measuring and then predicting the activities of peptides and proteins. First, we'll describe new software platforms that empower liquid-handling robots to perform complex high-throughput experiments, including maintaining hundreds of cultures at constant density with different inputs. We'll discuss how these platforms can continuously evolve dozens of populations, each with tens of millions of competing variants under different evolutionary conditions, to generate custom binders and enzymes, and how sequencing intermediates can extract useful data. Finally, we'll detail a new assay that can simultaneously measure the activity of every individual member of a library of enzyme mutants using nanopore sequencing, creating datasets ideal for training machine learning models to predict the activities of related peptides and proteins.
Presented by: Isabella Loaiza, Research Assistant in Human Dynamics at the MIT Media Lab and and Pierre-Alexandre Balland, Professor at Utrecht University, Visiting Professor in Artificial and Natural Intelligence, at Toulouse Institute, Diego Orisorio, Senior Policy Advisor, Infrastructure Canada
Share your challenges and questions for the Future of Work here.
Start Date & Time: August 22nd, 2023, 10:30am - 12:00pm (ET)
This workshop will feature two invited talks followed by a brainstorming session aimed at understanding the most pressing challenges that our member companies are facing with their current and future workforces.
AI and the Future of Work
The AI revolution is taking the world by storm, with most countries now prioritizing AI strategies in their agendas. AI is transforming industries by automating routine tasks, streamlining processes, and enhancing decision-making capabilities and most corporations recognize the need to integrate AI into their digital transitions to stay competitive and avoid disruption. In this presentation, Professor Balland has two objectives. First, to provide an overview of the recent advances in AI and their far-reaching implications across different sectors. Second, to shed light on the impact of AI on work, in particular on AI-human collaboration, innovation & creativity, talent acquisition, personalized work experience & training, remote work dynamics, and the emergence of new job roles and skills demanded by an AI-driven workplace. The talk does not require prior knowledge on the topic - just a deep interest in the challenges and opportunities that AI presents in shaping the future of work.
Big Moves: Tactics for career crafting for the future workforce
In a rapidly expanding professional possibility space, where workers face increasing pressure to reskill and upskill due to the impact of AI on job security and quality, Isabella presents her recent insights to assist workers in navigating the complexities of the world of work. She sheds light on effective tactics that enable workers to better plan their next professional steps and craft their careers using two large-scale resume datasets. With a vast pool of 4.5 million workers spanning over three decades, Isabella shares her recent insights into how occupational changes, relocation, or a combination of both can help workers increase their wages. As she concludes her talk, Isabella reveals how these models integrate into a larger family of models, powering a cutting-edge career-crafting tool for the workforce of the future. Join her as she paves the way for a more empowered workforce.
Presented by: Sam Stuewe, CBDC Software Engineer, Alistar Hughs, Product Manager, Gabriela Torres, Product Manager, Michael Maurer, Software Engineer, Digital Currency Initiative, MIT Media Lab
Start Date & Time: August 29, 2023, 10:30am-11:30am (ET)
The Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) is about to release Project Hamilton's Phase Two, which is the final output of this extensive collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Upon registration, attendees will receive a resource packet containing the OpenCBDC paper, a link to the OpenCBDC workshop, a question request form, and other useful information. Join us in late August for a Q&A session for those with questions (50% from the form and 50% live) with engineers and product managers from the DCI. This event is a primer session for Phase Two of Project Hamilton. When Phase Two is released, session attendees will receive release materials and an invitation to attend a research launch release session during Fall Members’ Week.