Data Nation

Why are they using more electric cars in Norway than in the US? What are the underlying mechanisms that drive technological change, and how can we influence them? What is ‘soft technology’ and what role can it play in lowering carbon emissions? In the season 2 finale of Data Nation, IDSS professor Jessika Trancik explains how her lab attempts to measure and model a technology’s real or potential impact, beneficial or harmful, on people, the environment, society — and on critical outcomes like mitigating climate change.

When Maxwell Frost was elected to Congress, he struggled to find housing in DC. Today he advocates for stronger consumer protections and authors legislation to level the playing field between renters and landlords. Frost joins Data Nation along with Catherine D’Ignazio, an Urban Science and Planning professor at MIT, to talk about the challenges renters and home buyers face, how algorithmic technology perpetuates discrimination, and the importance of understanding where data comes from and who benefits from usi

As an MIT professor and tech entrepreneur, Devavrat Shah has seen firsthand how AI tools can impact research, business, and careers. While some have dire warnings about the scale of harm AI can cause, Shah is optimistic. He joins the Data Nation podcast to dispel some doom and gloom, unpack ways that people are already using AI to make change for the better, and to examine how future benefits can emerge with regulation and education.

Facing the tough decisions of a serious health threat brings the need for information and analysis into a sharp and personal focus. Computer scientist Regina Barzilay was an expert in natural language processing when she joined MIT; her cancer diagnosis led her to collaborations in healthcare, where she has advanced imaging, prediction, drug discovery, and clinical AI. She joins Munther Dahleh and Liberty Vittert to talk about issues from data collection and privacy to bias and “distributional shift” – when an algorithm is used on a dataset with key differences from the data used to train it.

The term “election fraud” is on the verge of making a comeback with the approach of the 2024 presidential election. Liberty Vittert and Munther Dahleh speak to MIT political scientist and MIT Election Lab director Charles Stewart to get to the bottom of modern-day election fraud. When are voting errors significant? How has voting evolved throughout American history? What effect did the COVID pandemic have on our elections? What do you need to know to be an informed voter in America?

Liberty Vittert and Munther Dahleh dive into the world of augmented and virtual reality this month with Professor Fox Harrell.  Harrell is Professor of Digital Media & AI in both the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.  Is the world ready for what’s coming? Will augmented reality and virtual reality be a force for good or for evil, and what can you do to prepare yourself?

You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram @mitidss. Thanks for listening to Data Nation from the MIT Institute of Data Systems and Society.

Ford Professor in the MIT Department of Economics David Autor joins Data Nation to explore how AI automation can replace, augment, and unpredictably change how we work.

In this episode of Data Nation, we’re talking all about anesthesia and sleep with Dr. Emery Brown. Dr. Brown is a Professor in IDSS and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, as well as Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Data Nation is hosted by Professor Liberty Vittert and Dr. Munther Dahleh, the head of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Data Nation is a production of MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. 

A Native American man gets pulled over for driving a nice car, a black man is arrested in front of his family for a crime he didn’t commit – innocent people are at risk because of racial profiling. But to stop profiling, you have to first identify it, and that’s not as easy as it seems. Liberty and Scott are going deep into data in this episode, investigating how data is used against marginalized communities, and how it should be used to protect and serve them. They go to the experts to find out which methods are failing, what solutions can mitigate the dangers of facial recognition technology and smart policing, and how we know we’ve succeeded in ending profiling. 

Liberty and Scott speak with Craig Watkins, Martin Luther King Jr. visiting professor at MIT; and Brandon Del Pozo, former police chief in NYC and Vermont.

Data Nation is a production of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and Voxtopica. 

Artificial intelligence – it’s not the easiest thing to trust when it comes to our healthcare. I mean, will AI replace our doctors in the future? There’s a lot of uncertainty about algorithms deciding our medical fate, so Liberty and Scott are getting the truth on AI’s role in healthcare. They go to the experts to explore the problems behind biased algorithms and faulty diagnoses, and discover if AI will cause harm to patients or if it will progress the medical field farther than it could ever go. 

Liberty and Scott talk with Caroline Uhler, co-Director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and Niels Olson, Chief Medical Officer at the United States Defense Innovation Unit.

Data Nation is a production of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and Voxtopica.