School of Arts & Sciences

michael kearns recording a podcast

The programming ethos

In a podcast conversation, Penn professors Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth, and Lisa Miracchi discuss the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Brandon Baker ・

a ship in the middle of the Pacific ocean surrounded by text in latin

Around the world in 1,082 days

A Q&A with historian Antonio Feros reflecting on the 500th anniversary of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and how the voyage shaped both the 16th century and today.

Erica K. Brockmeier ・

hand holding a tablet

The virtual assistant

Artificial intelligence has permeated many corners of life, from consumer purchasing and media consumption to health care—sometimes in ways we don’t even know.

Michele W. Berger ・

self driving car

The human driver

As the ability to harness the power of artificial intelligence grows, so does the need to consider the difficult decisions and trade-offs humans make all the time about privacy, bias, ethics, and safety.

Gwyneth K. Shaw ・

A young child at a table with an adult, playing a game with blue plastic cups.

Minds in the wild

As part of a MindCORE effort to bring research into the community, behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Brannon and her team spent the summer conducting two studies at the Academy of Natural Sciences to better understand how children learn.

Michele W. Berger ・

Two people sitting on a stage, one gesturing with his hands. In front of them is a brown wooden table with two water bottles.

Dissecting the Green New Deal

During what’s likely the largest climate event ever held at Penn, leaders in a range of fields discussed the practicalities and implications of the resolution introduced into Congress in February aimed at stemming climate change.

Michele W. Berger ・



In the News


The Hill

R&D, not Greenland, can solve our rare earth problem

Research into rare earth metals by Eric Schelter, Patrick Carroll, Ph.D. student Justin Bogart, and alumnus Connor Lippincott of the School of Arts and Sciences was cited.

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Smithsonian Magazine

Women scientists were written out of history. It’s Margaret Rossiter’s lifelong mission to fix that

M. Susan Lindee of the School of Arts and Sciences praised academic Margaret Rossiter’s research on women’s contributions to science. “We have to look at her past work carefully,” said Lindee, “and re-examine all those brilliant strategies that women used to contest institutional power, which was oriented around preventing them from succeeding.”

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Philadelphia Inquirer

How reading a good book can make you a better person

Angela Duckworth of the School of Arts and Sciences wrote about the human capacity for empathy. “True, human beings tend to be egocentric, experiencing and reacting to the here-and-now of our lives,” she wrote. “But also true, and out of all species perhaps uniquely so, we’re capable of mentally untethering ourselves from our own narrative and imagining what it is like to walk a path entirely different than our own.”

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The Washington Post

Collection of premier proverb scholar opens at UVM

Dan Ben-Amos of the School of Arts and Sciences said Wolfgang Mieder of the University of Vermont is “one of the greatest proverb scholars of all times and the greatest of our generation.”

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Time

What to know about the origins of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics, from the French Revolution to the 2020 presidential race

Sophia Rosenfeld and Brent Cebul of the School of Arts and Sciences spoke about the use of “left” and “right” in political discourse. The terms began as “literal descriptions,” said Rosenfeld, of the seating patterns in 18th-century France’s post-revolution National Assembly.

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