Insights

The Global Philosopher, a special 4-part series with BBC Radio 4, gave Professor Michael J. Sandel an opportunity to initiate global dialogue like he’d never done before. Using HBX’s innovative Live Studio, the series virtually brought together individuals from across the globe to engage in lively debate about some of today’s most pressing issues. In this keynote from the 2018 Harvard University IT Summit, Sandel muses on the promise — and limitations — of this style of public discourse.

Fresno Unified School District had built a robust data-collection system, but none of it was being put to use. That is, until Harvard Strategic Data Project Fellow David Jansen developed a app that turned improving student outcomes into a compelling game.

Women are more likely than men to drop out of data science classes when they receive a low score in an early assignment. The Coursera team shares how they’re using targeted interventions to tackle this trend and help close the gender gap in STEM.

As the largest online learning platform for higher education, Coursera has global scale. In this flash talk from our 2018 Future Assembly, Head of Data Science Emily Glassberg Sand shares how she and her team of data scientists harness data from millions of participants to enhance learner outcomes and deliver personalized, targeted recommendations on everything from suggested courses to difficult problems.

This new robotic exosuit developed by researchers at the Wyss Institute and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) could push the limits of human performance and lead to new wearable technologies for athletes and consumers.

In this keynote from our 2018 Digital Transformation Summit, Rikard Steiber (HTC VIVE/Viveport) lays out the possibilities of an exciting, new super reality that combines the latest technologies in AR/VR, 5G, and artificial intelligence. The future of VR is here.

Technology is rapidly transforming the entire sports industry and revolutionizing how athletes train, perform and heal. This event, co-hosted by the Harvard Innovation Lab, OneTeam Collective, and the Sports Innovation Lab, provides an overview of the quantified athlete and sports technology space, from fitness tracking and predictive performance analytics to real-time analytics and athlete career management.

What if you could create designer probiotics using the gut bacteria of elite athletes, and what if those probiotics could enable consumers to tap into the biological advantages that make those athletes so special? Sound like science fiction? Maybe not…

Technological advancements have made it possible to imagine sports competitions of a very different variety than those we enjoy today. With so many avenues of entertainment open to us, it begs the question: in the future of sports who will the athletes be, human — or machine?

When you picture a screaming, sold out crowd at Madison Square Garden, esports (AKA professional gaming) might not be the first thing to come to mind. But with a current global audience of 385 million people and annual revenues of nearly $700 million, esports has become a growing and lucrative industry that’s promising enough to have even the owner of the New England Patriots investing.