News

• October 10, 2019

  Artificial Intelligence and Our Future World

  What are the practical implications of an AI-enabled world? As we think about the possibilities for digital campuses, corporations and communities in the future, it is important to keep in mind the limits of technology in solving social problems. Despite the optimistic promises of digital evangelists, it has become clear that most large-scale software systems exacerbate existing social inequality. In this talk, author and professor Meredith Broussard looks at the inner workings and outer limits of technology, and explains why we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against “technochauvinism” — the belief that technology is always the solution — Broussard looks at why self-driving cars don’t really work and why social problems persist in every digital Utopia. If we understand the limits of what we *can* do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we *should* do with it to make the world better for everyone.

• October 8, 2019

  Diversity in The Stacks

  The Penn Libraries launches a new initiative to enhance collections that reflect a diverse campus population. The Penn Libraries has launched a new initiative, Diversity in the Stacks, to build on collections that represent and reflect the University’s diverse population, and to highlight those works in a series of blog posts. First-generation, minority, and international students often report that they find research libraries intimidating, Brigitte Weinsteiger, associate university librarian for collections says, and the enhanced collections are an effort to try to change that impression at Penn. “Our libraries welcome people from all racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, religious, and gender backgrounds,” says Weinsteiger. “We want those identities to be represented in our collections.” The first featured collection on the blog is Afrofuturism. More than two dozen collections have been identified for future features.

• October 8, 2019

  Junior Chloe Gong Has a Deal to Publish Young-Adult Novel Set in 1920s Shanghai

  Visiting her grandmother in China during a middle-school summer, with nothing to read and no internet connection, Chloe Gong decided to write her own book to keep herself entertained. Continuing to write after returning home to New Zealand, her story ended up at 116,000 words, with a perfect protagonist who possessed every superpower imaginable. “These Violent Delights,” was accepted for publication by Simon & Schuster’s teen division, Simon Pulse, and is expected to be on bookshelves in the fall of 2020, as the first in a two-book series. “I’m really happy,” says Gong, a Benjamin Franklin Scholar who is pursuing majors in English and international relations, and a minor in Chinese.

• October 8, 2019

  A Simple Intervention Enduringly Reduces Anti-Muslim Sentiment

  Research from the Annenberg School for Communication found that calling out the hypocrisy of collective blame—holding an entire group that’s not our own responsible for acts of a single person—significantly lessened hostile sentiments toward that group. In the United States and Europe, Muslims are often collectively blamed for extremist violence by individual Muslims, like Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino, or the three coordinated attacks from members of the Islamic State in Paris in 2015. The same doesn’t hold, however, when the terrorist committing the act is a white Christian, like Dylann Roof’s attacks in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Very few people hold all white Christians responsible. Emile Bruneau, who runs the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to understand why collective blame—holding an entire population responsible for the acts of a single person belonging to that group—happens and how challenging it might be to change.

• October 8, 2019

  Sculptor Michelle Lopez Creates Installation for ICA Exhibition ‘Ballast & Barricades’

  Michelle Lopez pushes the boundaries of materials in a new room-sized exhibition, “Ballast & Barricades,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The site-specific installation, on display until May 10, features construction-derived materials hanging from, and reaching up to, the 30-foot-high gallery ceiling. Steel pipes, chain-link fencing, wooden barricades, and bright orange ropes fill the room from top to bottom, all connected, balanced by a 1,000-pound piece of a building salvaged from a teardown in Northeast Philadelphia.