Rupa Kurinchi-Vendhan (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL) is able to read coral health from the sky and listen to marine life while on land. Remote sensing, computer vision, machine learning, and more — Rupa explains how AI is revolutionizing conservation, helping scientists learn more about the planet's most uncharted landscapes through data and models.

Andy Haverly was just developing software, until one day, he fell into a rabbit hole of the climate crisis. Determined to fix the problem, he began investigating one radical method that could offer a solution: nuclear bombs. No further description needed here. Blow your mind in this episode and in his published paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17174v1

Researcher Kye Shimizu designs interfaces. “Algorithmic couture," wearable stimulants, shifting identities. What exactly he (and MIT’s Media Lab) does is often unclear – the fuzzy boundary where information passes between you and a computer, the blurry line that defines you and not you.

If you ask James Brice what he does, at first he might say marine science. Then architecture. And previously physics. Animal husbandry. Navy. We conduct a thorough analysis of his identity now – at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences – and beyond.