About the Gitner Family Lecture
The annual Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family College of Arts & Sciences Lecture is designed to highlight current CAS faculty members, in any field, whose teaching and research addresses topics of major importance for the broad interest and benefit of the BU community. It is held in the fall, usually in conjunction with Alumni Weekend.
Gerald Gitner (CAS ’66) graduated with a B.A. in History, cum laude, and was elected to Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society. Additionally, he has an MBA from the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester, where he is a member of the Simon Advisory Board. He is a Trustee Emeritus of Boston University (serving as Trustee 1984-1996) and a current member of the CAS Dean’s Advisory Board and the Pardee School for Global Studies Dean’s Advisory Board. Gitner is a principal of Cross Continent Capital LLC, an investment company he co-founded. He serves as Chairman of Global Aero Holdings Ltd. and D. G. Associates, Inc., and has a long and varied career as an executive, including serving as Chairman and CEO Of Trans World Airlines, Inc. and Vice Chairman of Pan American World Airways. This lecture series was established by Gitner and his wife, Deanne. Gitner and his family have long been generous and engaged members of the Boston University community.
2023 Lecture:
Gitner Family Lecture, Saturday, September 23, 3:30 p.m., Tsai Auditorium, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
What does it mean to be human in the world of AI?
Panelists:
Margarita Guillory, Associate Professor of Religion; Rachell Powell, Professor of Philosophy; Rachel Denison, Assistant Professor of Psychology & Brain Sciences; Pascual Restrepo, Associate Professor of Economics
Margarita Guillory is an associate professor of religion. Guillory teaches courses on American religious history, digital religion, and religion and popular culture. Her research interests include identity construction in Africana esoteric religions, religion and technology, and social scientific approaches to religion. Her current project, Africana Religion in the Digital Age, considers how African Americans utilize the Internet, social media, mobile applications, and gaming to forge new ways to express their religious identities.
Rachell Powell is a professor of philosophy with wide-ranging and highly interdisciplinary research interests. Her interests falling roughly along two main themes: (1) conceptual and methodological problems in evolutionary theory and (2) ethical dimensions of the new biosciences. She has made contributions to topics such as macroevolutionary theory, human evolution, the evolution of morality, the natural history of mind and value, theories of disease, animal and environmental philosophy, the ethics of human germline modification, and the biomedical enhancement of human capacities. In future work she plans to explore the psychology of trauma and its biocultural intersections with gender and sexuality.
Rachel Denison is an assistant professor in the department of Psychological & Brain Sciences studying visual perception, attention, and decision-making, with a focus on temporal dynamics. Her lab’s research integrates behavioral measurements (psychophysics, eye tracking), neural measurements (fMRI, EEG/MEG), and computational modeling. Denison asks some of the following questions: How does the brain determine whether and how well we see something? How does it integrate different pieces of visual information to give us a coherent perceptual experience? And how does it do this in real time, even as visual input changes?
Pascual Restrepo is an associate professor of economics whose research interests span labor and macroeconomics. His current research examines the impact of technology, and in particular of automation, on labor markets, employment, wages, inequality, the distribution of income, and growth. Recent empirical projects include a study of the impact of industrial robots on US labor markets, a study of how the decline of routine jobs interacted with the great recession, and a study on how aging and shortages of labor induce firms to automate their production process. His theoretical work centers on developing micro-founded models of technology choice to think about the short and long-run implications of different technologies and whether the resulting growth process is balanced.