Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Joseph Priestley Award Celebration Lecture

y code when ai?

Hadley Wickham is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC

Software engineering has irrevocably changed, and there is now relatively little need to personally type code. But I don’t think this means you should no longer learn to code. In fact, it’s now a better time to learn than ever before. Coding agents might have changed how we create code, but code as an artifact of reasoning and reproducibility is still incredibly valuable.

I’ll share what I’ve learned using AI tools in my own software engineering practice, particularly the importance of the “double-entry accounting” of programming—unit tests—and the importance of creating an adversarial environment for code generation. I’ll also include some speculation about how AI will affect data science. It’s less clear to me how this is going to play out, since it’s much harder to automatically validate the most important parts of data science.

This is a scary time, but it’s also exhilarating. I built an iPhone app in a couple of hours without ever having written Swift. The ceiling on what individuals can build has never been higher, and it’s easier than ever to bring Read more

Mathers Theatre, 7 p.m.

The Archive

Neta Pulvermacher, Israeli/American Choreographer, Dancer, Director and a Professor of Dance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (JAMD)

The Archive
Created and Performed by Neta Pulvermacher

“They are not here,
And they are not coming
There is nothing here…
There is nothing here for you
It’s just this room and you and me.
And they are not here…
Go home, go home…
There’s no sense in waiting”

When the last person who remembers is gone, whole worlds disappear forever. Israeli/American artist, choreographer and performer Neta Pulvermacher, situates her riveting one woman show, The Archive, inside this perforated post-memory landscape. Exploring her German-Jewish family history, she constructs a jarring, witty and deeply moving performative journey that follows the traces to Frankfurt and Berlin – once her family’s home.

Inside a room containing a table, three chairs, a reading lamp, and an old violin, Pulvermacher sifts through documents, photographs, and personal artifacts. She dances, sings, and tells stories, conjuring fragmented narratives, voices, and characters that connect briefly only to fade away into oblivion. In her “Archive,” she asks us to consider the ephemerality of memory, history, and experience.

The Archive premiered at Villa Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

When Trees Testify: Learning From and With Trees

Beronda L. Montgomery is a writer, science communicator, researcher and professor at Grinnell College

Montgomery will discuss themes from her recent book, When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy, including the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.

The program is presented by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by The Trout Gallery and is in conjunction with the Trout Gallery exhibition Branch: Trees in American Art.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Beronda L. Montgomery, Ph.D., is writer, science communicator, and researcher. She has spent Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Can a Computer Program Think Like a Human?

John MacCormick is Professor of Computer Science at Dickinson College

Computer scientists have known since the 1950s that it is possible, in principle, for a computer to emulate human cognitive processes.  But the startling advances in artificial intelligence over the last two decades have given us new insights into some specific similarities between human cognition and the computer programs known as a deep neural networks. These similarities will be explained without assuming any background knowledge from the audience. Armed with an understanding of how modern AI systems work, we can debate the consequences for a liberal arts education.

This program is presented by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

John MacCormick’s work in computer science spans several sub-fields, including artificial intellegence, computer vision, large-scale distributed systems, computer science education, and the public understanding of computer science. He is the author of four books, including Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers and Thinking AI: How Artificial Intelligence Emulates Human Understanding. Dr. MacCormick holds 19 US patents on novel computer technologies and is the author Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

From the Kafala to Human Trafficking: Migrant Domestic Work Across the Globe

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is the Doris Stevens Professor in Women’s Studies and Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University

This talk provides a global overview of the labor exploitation faced by migrant domestic workers. It demonstrates how these workers share a legal status as bound laborers who cannot easily leave their jobs, rendering them uniquely vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking. Across the globe, migrant domestic workers operate under systems where their legal status mandates they work solely for a specific sponsor and, for the most part, live in their employer’s home. This reality suggests that the kafala—or a kafala-like system—is not unique to the Middle East, but is instead a global condition of labor.

This structural binding reveals that migrant women, who make up the vast majority of this workforce, are not treated as independent economic migrants, but are instead legally reduced to household dependents. This status severely limits their ability to participate in a free labor market, preventing them from seeking higher salaries or better labor standards, while simultaneously leaving them highly exposed to abuse. Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

No livestream, however, the program will be recorded for future campus-only viewing.

The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism

Cynthia Miller-Idriss,  professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education at the American University and founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL)

What two things do most mass shooters, terrorists, or violent extremists have in common? Most of us know the first: they are almost always men or boys. But the second? They are almost always virulent misogynists, homophobes, or transphobes—even if they are also motivated by racism, antisemitism, or xenophobia. In dozens of incidents from North America to Norway to New Zealand, an increasing number of misogynist incel (involuntarily celibate) and male supremacist attackers have explicitly targeted and killed women, blaming feminism or sexual frustration with women as motivation for their attacks. Yet, despite all evidence, the bright red thread of misogyny running through these attacks is barely acknowledged by the media or even experts—and this failing leaves us powerless to stop the violence. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a leading expert on extremism, will discuss this crucial oversight, revealing how an epidemic of misogyny—both Read more