According to UN estimates, over 122 million people are displaced due to conflict, persecution, and climate change. Many more remain unaccounted for and are broadly categorized as migrants or stateless persons. These communities face complex healthcare challenges owing to changing and unstable environments and new diseases. Professor Zaman will discuss the role technology and basic science in improving their healthcare access, along with the ethical challenges these approaches present.Muhammad Zaman is the HHMI Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. He is the author of We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), four other books, and over 130 peer-reviewed research articles on innovation, refugee health, and global health. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 for his work on antibiotic resistance in refugee camps and was previously a postdoctoral fellow in cancer research at MIT.Lunch will be available at 11:45am. Please RSVP here.Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming CIS Global Research & Policy Seminars.

Join us on Monday, February 24, 2025, at 12 pm in the Nexus, Hayden Library for a talk led by Zeynep Tufekci, Turkish-American sociologist and Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University.What if the Real Threat is Artificial Good-Enough Intelligence?Are we having the wrong nightmares about AI? Many worry that “artificial general intelligence” — AGI, or when machine intelligence matches or exceeds that of humans — poses a severe threat. These newly-superintelligent machines could turn on their creators, we’ve been warned, like Skynet in the apocalyptic movie Terminator.But many early predictions — fears and hopes — about how new technologies will change the world turn out to be false or misleading. Meanwhile, significant risks that arise simply from increased speed, expanded scale or lower costs that technology enables are often overlooked.A new technology does not have to outperform humans, or even be singularly sensational compared to previous technologies, to fuel extreme turbulence and instability, usually in an unforeseen manner. Cars weren’t so transformative simply because they exceeded the speed benchmark set by horses, nor were they horseless carriages.In this talk, Tufekci will examine the disruptive and even potentially catastrophic risks from Artificial Good-Enough Intelligence — AI that can do things not necessarily as well as humans but just good enough to be useful while being faster, cheaper and deployable at scale, and in ways that go beyond current concerns such as employment effects, productivity or bias.

Want to get exercise mid-day but don’t want to go outside? Join the tunnel walk for a 30-minute walk led by a volunteer through MIT’s famous tunnel system. This walk may include stairs/inclines. Wear comfortable shoes. Free.Location details: Meet in the lobby with the big mirror, right inside the Collier Memorial entrance to Stata. Location photo below.Tunnel Walk Leaders will have a white flag they will raise at the meeting spot for you to find them.Prize Drawing: Attend a walk and scan a QR code from the walk leaders to be entered into a drawing for a getfit tote bag at the end of the getfit challenge. The more walks you attend, the more entries you get. Winner will be drawn and notified at the end of April. Winner does not need to be a getfit participant.Disclaimer: Tunnel walks are led by volunteers. In the rare occasion when a volunteer isn’t able to make it, we will do our best to notify participants. In the event we are unable to notify participants and a walk leader does not show up, we encourage you to walk as much as you feel comfortable doing so. We recommend checking this calendar just before you head out! [As of Feb 12, this calendar is defaulting to the year 1899. Click "today" to be brought to the current month.]Getfit is a 12-week fitness challenge for the entire MIT community. These tunnel walks are open to the entire MIT community and you do not need to be a current getfit participant to join.

The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT will be hosting the 13th Annual Research Day event on Monday, February 24. The topic of this year’s event is Understanding the Biodiversity-Climate-Infrastructure nexus, hosted by Associate Professors Admir Masic and Serguei Saavedra.The event will consist of lightning-fast research talks and poster presentations by CEE faculty, students, and postdocs. It will also include light food and drinks during the poster presentation reception hours.Join us for an exciting event! Please RSVP here by Friday, February 14.

Ten minutes for your mind@2:50 every day at 2:50 pm in multiple time zones:Europa@2:50, EET, Athens, Helsinki (UTC+2) (7:50 am EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298032734Atlantica@2:50, EST, New York, Toronto (UTC-4) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85349851047Pacifica@2:50, PST, Los Angeles, Vancouver (UTC=7) (5:50 pm EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85743543699Almost everything works better again if you unplug it for a bit, including your mind. Stop by and unplug. Get the benefits of mindfulness without the fuss.@2:50 meets at the same time every single day for ten minutes of quiet together.No pre-requisite, no registration needed.Visit the website to view all @2:50 time zones each day.at250.org or at250.mit.edu

Hosted by MENA/MITMichael Freedman studies religion, conflict, and citizen-state interactions in Israel and the Muslim world. His work combines big data approaches with experiments and in-depth interviews. He is an assistant professor (lecturer) in political science at the University of Haifa, where he is also a founder of the Political Behaviour Lab and a member of the Haifa Data Science Research Center. His research has been published in multiple outlets including the American Sociological Review, Political Behavior, Political Science Research Methods, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. He holds a PhD in political science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2019).Register here.