On March 22, Boston Globe business reporter Jon Chesto will speak broadly about current events shaping Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Future

Jon Chesto covers the leaders who shape Boston’s business community. He has been reporting on business and politics in New England for the past two decades. Before joining the Globe, he was managing editor at the Boston Business Journal. Prior to that role, he was the business editor at The Patriot Ledger in Quincy. His weekly Ledger column, “Mass. Market,” won several national awards with the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. A graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, he has also worked as a business reporter at the Boston Herald and as a political reporter with Ottaway Newspapers.

Richard Adler rejoins us on March 8th to revisit Bending the Law of Unintended Consequences: More Decision Support Models.

We witness the unintended consequences of critical decisions all around us, like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the disastrous war in Gaza. My presentation for the Wilson Science and Technology group last year described a “test drive” method for improving critical policy and business decisions. Much like consumers try out cars before buying one, decision test drives help organizations explore the possible outcomes of decision options before committing to one alternative. This method helps leaders improve anticipation of the future and thereby avoid unintended outcomes. My follow-on talk will revisit the test drive method in more detail. I’ll present a rationale for our method by explaining how it improves upon existing decision support techniques. I’ll also describe our hybrid simulation approach, which improves realism in modeling the complex situational dynamics that shape decision outcomes. Finally, I’ll present a business example to illustrate these concepts. This test drive case study improves decisions about competitive marketing strategy in the pharmaceutical industry.

Rich Adler is a software architect, management consultant, and start-up executive. He spent most of his career building software tools and applications to improve business operations and critical decision-making. Richard worked for Control Data, MITRE, Computer Sciences Corporation, and three software start-up companies. Early in his career, Richard built AI programs, including one that automated operations support for the Launch Processing System for NASA’s Space Shuttle Fleet. As the founder of DecisionPath, he developed solutions to improve strategic decisions such as competitive marketing, counterterrorism, and organizational change, as described in his recent book Bending the Law of Unintended Consequences. Richard has published and spoken on topics including intelligent and distributed systems, simulation, homeland security, and knowledge management. Richard holds a BS degree in Physics and Philosophy (University of Michigan), an MS in Physics (University of Illinois at Urbana) and a PhD in Philosophy of Physics (University of Minnesota).

On February 23rd, MIT Professor Jesus del Alamo will speak on the future direction of microelectronics, Microelectronics: Quo Vadis?

The COVID pandemic, in dramatic form, made evident the critical role that microelectronics plays in modern human society. Supply disruptions brought us the realization that semiconductor chips are like oxygen, only when we don’t have them we come to appreciate how much we depend on them for nearly every aspect of our lives. Indeed, countries around the world have all of a sudden recognized the strategic nature of semiconductor microelectronics and policies to foster on-shore production of the most advanced chips and to strengthen the robustness of supply chains are being enacted around the globe. Beyond its strategic importance, semiconductor microelectronics is a domain that wonderfully illustrates what human ingenuity can accomplish. For over 50 years now, the power of microelectronics has been increasing exponentially. While the popular press has been warning us of the impending “End of Moore’s Law”, technologists continue to push the technology forward. At any one time, they see 10 more years of continuous progress ahead. This talk will review the long march of microelectronics to this date and the opportunities and challenges going forward. In its late middle age, the field remains youthful and pregnant with possibilities.

Jesús A. del Alamo is the Donner Professor and Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He obtained a Telecommunications Engineer degree from Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain) and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. In 1985 he joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone LSI Laboratories in Japan and since 1988 he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2013 until 2019, he served as Director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories at MIT. His current research interests are focused on nanoelectronics based on compound semiconductors and ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors and novel ionic and ferroelectric devices for artificial intelligence accelerators. Prof. del Alamo was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator. He is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society. He is the recipient of the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award in Emerging Research Devices, the Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence Award, the IEEE Electron Devices Society Education Award, the University Researcher Award by Semiconductor Industry Association and Semiconductor Research Corporation, the IPRM Award and the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award. From 2019 to 2022 he served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Electron Device Letters. He is the author of “Integrated Microelectronic Devices: Physics and Modeling” (Pearson 2017, 880 pages), a rigorous and up to date description of semiconductor physics, transistors and other contemporary microelectronic devices.