Veritas Forum welcomes Drs. Anderson Spickard & Rosalin Picard of MIT
Where does morality come from? Isn’t science rapidly approaching a complete explanation of nature? Do you ever have doubts about your worldview? Where can I find meaning and fulfillment?
College students around the world are asking themselves and their friends these questions, but there is often no real place to explore these questions alongside brilliant faculty and leading thinkers.
Veritas Forums are university events that engage students and faculty in discussions about life’s hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life. With the combined effort of Vanderbilt religious organizations, Veritas Forum will host Drs. Anderson Spickard & Rosalin Picard of MIT to talk on “Are We Merely Machines? An MIT Professor’s Look at Humanity, Theology, and God” on Tuesday, January 28th at 8 pm in Langford Auditorium. Read below for more about these exciting speakers.
Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab. She is also co-founder, chairman, and chief scientist for the MIT spin-out company, Affectiva. Picard also co-directs the MIT Autism and Communication Technology Initiative.
The author of over two hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in multidimensional signal modeling, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, Picard is known internationally for pioneering research in affective computing and, prior to that, research in content-based image and video retrieval. She is a graduate with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.
Picard is an active inventor and her group’s inventions have been twice named to “top ten” lists, including the New York Times Magazine’s Best Ideas of 2006 for their Social Cue Reader, Used In Autism, and 2011’s Popular Science Top Ten Inventions for a Mirror that Monitors Vital Signs.
Anderson Spickard, III, M.D., M.S., is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Departments of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics. He is currently the Director of the Medical Student Clerkship Program for the Department of Medicine, the Director of Programs for Technological Innovations in Medical Education for the Medical Center, and appointed to Master Teacher in the School of Medicine.
Since joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 1995, Dr. Spickard has built an active practice and teaching contribution in Internal Medicine and has conducted faculty development workshops and studies of innovative approaches to medical education. He directs the Core Medicine Clerkship in the third year of medical school and the Core Primary Care Clerkship in the fourth year of medical school. Dr. Spickard also brings his expertise in study design and the evaluation of medical education to form partnerships between departments in the Medical Center that are providing Vanderbilt innovative curricula and a sustained research agenda in medical education. Dr. Spickard has won a number of local teaching awards and was named the 2000 Teacher of the Year for the Southern Region of the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM). And serves on the Vanderbilt Academic Program Committee. He has served on the National Program Committee for SGIM for a number of years and was instrumental in creating the Innovations in Medical Education session that is a standard format now at the national SGIM meeting. Dr. Spickard currently sits on the SGIM National Education Committee, and is he is an Executive Council Member of the Tennessee Chapter of the American College of Physicians.
Dr. Spickard’s research interests include all aspects of medical education with a special focus on the design and application of innovative informatics approaches to medical education.