CRCS Blog

George Kellaris on the Fraught Line between Usefulness and Privacy

I meet George Kellaris at Hi-Rise Bakery, where he waves off my attempts to pay for coffee. Kellaris is a second-year postdoc who divides his time between Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society and the Computer Science program at Boston University. As an undergraduate, Kellaris chose computer science over his other passion – psychology. But he did not forsake the social sciences entirely. Indeed, Kellaris is a fine example of CRCS’ central mission – to do computational science research not for its own sake, but for the good of society. He decided to work on privacy issues...

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Engineering and Entrepreneurship: The Internet of Things - Lightning Talks

After Brenna Berman’s keynote address, four Harvard SEAS professors gave lightning talks about their research on the Internet of Things. Scot Martin, Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Chemistry, spoke about how “Drone-Based Sensing Opens New Frontiers in the Environmental Sciences: Possibilities for Amazonia.” Martin discussed his project to use drone technology to “smell” the atmosphere of the Brazilian Amazon to quantify biodiversity and detect environmental change. Traditional efforts at monitoring Amazonia suffer from two fundamental problems: stationary sensor towers yield data...

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Engineering and Entrepreneurship: The Internet of Things - Keynote Talk

On September 30th, CRCS joined forces with the Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS), the Harvard Business School (HBS), and Boston’s Hubweek event to host the second symposium in their annual collaborative series on engineering and entrepreneurship. This symposium explored the “Internet of Things” (IOT), a rapidly emerging field in which everyday objects possess network connectivity that allows them to send and receive data. Widespread IOT, which has moved from the realm of science fiction to science future, provides unforeseen opportunities for technological innovation and...

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