On February 11, I got a call from MIT’s executive director of Institute events and protocol, Gayle Gallagher. President Reif had just announced that MIT would again be conducting commencement online—and to open the ceremony, we needed a compelling piece of music that would evoke renewal as we began to emerge from the pandemic.
After nearly a year of socially distanced teaching, learning, and living, I envisioned music that not only reflected upon the losses and challenges we’ve faced but also embraced optimism about how we might come back from darkness as a better and more thoughtful society. Involving many music students and highlighting MIT’s iconic campus quickly became priorities. And the intimacy of the voice was a must.
But what was feasible, given MIT’s covid protocols? With few exceptions, students weren’t allowed to play or sing together in the same spaces. And who—on short notice—could craft a composition with such a specific intention, and for the unusual combined forces of orchestra, wind ensemble, jazz ensemble, Senegalese drumming ensemble, and multiple choirs? We needed a composer with the technical and professional chops to tackle such a daunting task—and the heart and humanity to understand why it was needed for this moment in time.
I instantly knew that Tony Award–winning alumnus Jamshied Sharifi ’83, with his long history of working with MIT students and his willingness to take on large-scale projects, was the only person for the job. Always in high demand—even during the pandemic—as an arranger, producer, and composer for Broadway, film, and artists in many genres, he agreed to do it at once.
Because this project would involve singers, unlike the instrumental collaborations we’d done over the years, we knew we had to find an appropriate text. At Gayle’s suggestion, I contacted MIT poet Erica Funkhouser, who compiled some of her students’ recent poems about the pandemic. And once Jamshied read them, his vision became clear. “The emotional openness, simplicity, and, at times, aching sadness of their writing was my guiding light,” he says, “and informed all compositional decisions.”
From inbox to realization
Though I’ve coordinated other complex, large-scale concerts, this project was uncharted territory. It involved organizing recording sessions for five ensembles, accommodating students not on campus, rehearsing in person and online, and structuring a 10-hour film shoot in five locations on campus. The logistical challenges were mind-boggling—we even had to get a massive crane on the sidewalk outside of 77 Mass. Ave. moved.
On May 3—a month and a day before the commencement-day premiere—Jamshied’s score and midi file for Diary of a Pandemic Year arrived in my inbox. I knew well what he was capable of, but what he’d sent brought me to tears. The flow, the tone, his handling of the text, and the way he shaped this five-and-a-half-minute sonic journey from dark to light—all of it was just perfect. Because he wanted vocalists to hear their parts with real voices, he had also taken on the arduous task of recording all of them for the audio file himself.
My colleagues and I were off and running to bring the piece to life. Multimedia specialist Luis “Cuco” Daglio—who helped keep Music and Theater Arts musical performances going for 15 straight months—again donned his superhero cape, recording seven separate sessions for groups of MIT musicians.
So how did the final virtual performance come together? First, all the instrumentalists and vocalists recorded themselves playing or singing to Jamshied’s midi file. Jamshied then mixed and mastered all these tracks—well over 200 of them—until Diary of a Pandemic Year was transformed into a living, breathing piece of music.
“Reading the MIT poets’ selected lines, I began to get a sense of the impact of the pandemic on young people—its larger significance given their fewer years on the planet, its limiting force on a time that should for them be exploratory.”
—Jamshied Sharifi ’83
During the epic filming day—overseen by Clayton Hainsworth, director of MIT Video Productions (MVP)—the original file was amplified through speakers for all players and singers to perform to live. Even with the restriction of having to play or sing to the midi track, it still felt revelatory. Emmy Award–winning MVP producer and editor Jean Dunoyer ’87 led the video team, which beautifully captured the emotional scope of the composition and the expressiveness of the students’ performance.
“At the end of a long year and a half of meeting to make music over Zoom and in separate practice rooms, filming the music video gave us a chance to perform together in person in a very meaningful way,” says MIT Wind Ensemble saxophonist Rachel Morgan, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “It meant so much to see what MIT music can do!”
While Jamshied was working his audio-mixing magic, Jean, whom I consider the other magician of the project, was creatively translating the score to film. “I wanted the piece to be an invitation to the community to return to campus, unmasked and in person,” he explains. “The joy of togetherness was the thing that was most missed by our students over the past months, and when the signal arrived that the vaccine was working, the yearning to gather once again was palpable.”
Powerful messages for the future
The work everyone took on to realize Diary of a Pandemic Year was emblematic of the central role music, and the arts in general, play in the lives of so many MIT students. It testified to how determined students, faculty, and staff had been to ensure the continuation of music performance under very trying circumstances since the start of the pandemic.
As Erica put it, “Diary of a Pandemic Year felt like a musical postcard to the graduates from The World, even though it could only have been created at MIT.”
Days before the premiere, Jamshied reflected upon the universality of the piece and its central message. “Reading the MIT poets’ selected lines, and the longer poems from which they were drawn, I began to get a sense of the impact of the pandemic on young people—its larger significance given their fewer years on the planet, its limiting force on a time that should for them be exploratory and expansive, and its uncomfortable place in a matrix of unfolding calamities brought on primarily by human inattention and hubris,” he wrote. “The current moment feels hopeful; the birds sing of new life. But I sense in the pandemic a warning, and an unsubtle suggestion that we should not ‘return to normal,’ but seek an evolved, equitable, and holistic way of structuring our world. Our young people know this in their bones. We should listen.”
Frederick Harris Jr. of the Music and Theater Arts faculty is music director of the MIT Wind Ensemble and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble.
The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania.
Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.
Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.
A changing way of life
The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.
Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.
One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.
Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.
The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.
Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.
Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost.
But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures
The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.
Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.
According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.
Mapping out a generative AI pathway
One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.
The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.
Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.
All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.
The benefits of third-party experience
Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).
Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”
