Ada Lovelace’s Legacy and the Contemporary Culture of Computing

Ada Lovelace’s Legacy and the Contemporary Culture of Computing08oct7:00 pm7:00 pm

Event Details

Join us on Saturday, Oct. 8 at 7:00pm for a pre-show conversation with David Kaiser, Katrina LaCurts, and Kelcey Gibbons.

In 1843, Ada Lovelace completed her notes on Charles Babbage’s design for the Analytical Engine, articulating its capacity to weave algebraic patterns, and envisioning how it might one day be used to create music and images. In 2022, we live enmeshed in a culture of computing and digital technology, with compounding possibilities and confounding questions. 

Can we take an historical view that empowers us to shape the evolution of a computer culture infused with our humanity?  

more

Speakers for this event

  • David Kaiser

    David Kaiser

    David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he also served as an inaugural Associate Dean at MIT for Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. He is the author of several award-winning books, including How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, and Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World. Kaiser co-directs a research group on early-universe cosmology with Alan Guth in MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, and has also designed and helped to conduct novel experimental tests of quantum theory. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. His group’s recent efforts to conduct a “Cosmic Bell” test of quantum entanglement were featured in a documentary film, Einstein’s Quantum Riddle, which premiered on PBS in 2019. The Cosmic Bell test also inspired an exhibit at the MIT Museum and a related play about quantum entanglement, Both/And, written by Patrick Gabridge and produced by the Catalyst Collaborative partnership between Central Square Theater and MIT.

  • Katrina LaCurts

    Katrina LaCurts

    Katrina LaCurts is a Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Officer in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Primary academic interests lie in the intersection of computer systems and society, and Dr. LaCurts specializes in the teaching of large undergraduate systems courses and managing the EECS Undergraduate Office, which serves nearly 1700 students. Dr. LaCurts serves on the Office of Minority Education’s Faculty Advisory Committee and has been a member of the EECS Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the Dean’s Action Group on Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. In 2021, Dr. LaCurts received the inaugural School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award.

  • Kelsey Gibbons

    Kelsey Gibbons

    Kelcey Gibbons is a PhD student at MIT in the HASTS program (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society). Her research focuses on race and technology, particularly the African American experience of technology in the late 19th to mid 20th century. She is interested in the computer as a technology of black freedom, community building, and American citizenship; and in how black betterment organizations wove the computer into black freedom narratives and how the computer (as a device, idea, image) contributed to how those freedoms were imagined, sought-after, communicated. Recent publications include “Inventing the Black Computer Professional”, in Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society.