Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory". He was the first to describe the boolean gates that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and he built the first machine learning device, thus founding the field of artificial intelligence. He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
Organization development (OD) is the study and implementation of practices, systems, and techniques that affect organizational change. The goal of which is to modify a group's/organization's performance and/or culture. The organizational changes are typically initiated by the group's stakeholders. OD emerged from human relations studies in the 1930s, during which psychologists realized that organizational structures and processes influence worker behavior and motivation.
Action research is a philosophy and methodology of research generally applied in the social sciences. It seeks transformative change through the simultaneous process of taking action and doing research, which are linked together by critical reflection. Kurt Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term "action research" in 1944. In his 1946 paper "Action Research and Minority Problems" he described action research as "a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action" that uses "a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action and fact-finding about the result of the action".
Peter Michael Senge is an American systems scientist who is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. He is known as the author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
The Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, as well as executive education. Its degree programs are among the most selective in the world. MIT Sloan emphasizes innovation in practice and research. Many influential ideas in management and finance originated at the school, including the Black–Scholes model, the Solow–Swan model, the random walk hypothesis, the binomial options pricing model, and the field of system dynamics. The faculty has included numerous Nobel laureates in economics and John Bates Clark Medal winners.
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is a book by Peter Senge focusing on group problem solving using the systems thinking method in order to convert companies into learning organizations that learn to create results that matter as an organization. The five disciplines represent classical approaches for developing three core and timeless learning capabilities: fostering aspiration, developing reflective conversation, and understanding complexity.
Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Currently, she is a professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of the Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab. Her most recent work has focused on the theme of living everyday life in the presence of AI, and gradually gaining insight into the long-term impacts of social robots.
In business management, a learning organization is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. The concept was coined through the work and research of Peter Senge and his colleagues.
Margaret (Meg) Wheatley is an American writer, teacher, speaker, and management consultant who works to create organizations and communities worthy of human habitation. She draws from many disciplines: organizational behavior, chaos theory, living systems science, ancient spiritual traditions, history, sociology, and anthropology.
Robert Kegan is an American developmental psychologist. He is a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development and organization development.
Bernardus Cornelis Johannes Lievegoed was a Dutch medical doctor, psychiatrist and author. He is most famous for establishing a theory of organizational development. He founded the N.P.I., or Netherlands Pedagogical Institute, which works with organizations and individuals to help these realize their economic, social and cultural goals. He also founded the Vrije Hogeschool in Driebergen.
Betty Sue Flowers is the former director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum (2002–2009) and an Emerita Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
Leonardo is a 2.5 foot social robot, the first created by the Personal Robots Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its development is credited to Cynthia Breazeal. The body is by Stan Winston Studios, leaders in animatronics. Its body was completed in 2002. It was the most complex robot the studio had ever attempted as of 2001. Other contributors to the project include NevenVision, Inc., Toyota, NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, and the Navy Research Lab. It was created to facilitate the study of human–robot interaction and collaboration. A DARPA Mobile Autonomous Robot Software (MARS) grant, Office of Naval Research Young Investigators Program grant, Digital Life, and Things that Think consortia have partially funded the project. The MIT Media Lab Robotic Life Group, who also studied Robonaut 1, set out to create a more sophisticated social-robot in Leonardo. They gave Leonardo a different visual tracking system and programs based on infant psychology that they hope will make for better human-robot collaboration. One of the goals of the project was to make it possible for untrained humans to interact with and teach the robot much more quickly with fewer repetitions. Leonardo was awarded a spot in Wired Magazine’s 50 Best Robots Ever list in 2006.
Daniel J. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute.
Yasheng Huang is an American professor in international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he founded and heads the China Lab and India Lab. His research areas include human capital formation in China and India.
Inspiring Education: A Dialogue with Albertans is an initiative enacted in 2009 by the Minister of Education of Alberta, Canada, David Hancock and Alberta Education to encourage discussion relating to building a long-term education framework focusing on values, goals, and processes.
Theory U is a change management method and the title of a book by Otto Scharmer. Scharmer with colleagues at MIT conducted 150 interviews with entrepreneurs and innovators in science, business, and society and then extended the basic principles into a theory of learning and management, which he calls Theory U. The principles of Theory U are suggested to help political leaders, civil servants, and managers break through past unproductive patterns of behavior that prevent them from empathizing with their clients' perspectives and often lock them into ineffective patterns of decision making.
Michael Justin Kearns is an American computer scientist, professor and National Center Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, the founding director of Penn's Singh Program in Networked & Social Systems Engineering (NETS), the founding director of Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, and also holds secondary appointments in Penn's Wharton School and department of Economics. He is a leading researcher in computational learning theory and algorithmic game theory, and interested in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computational finance, algorithmic trading, computational social science and social networks. He previously led the Advisory and Research function in Morgan Stanley's Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence team, and is currently an Amazon Scholar within Amazon Web Services.
Munther A. Dahleh is the William Coolidge Professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).
“The Art of Hosting” is a method of participatory leadership for facilitating group processes, as used by a loose-knit community of practitioners. In their method, people are invited into structured conversation about matters they are concerned about while facilitators act as hosts. This community group understands “hosting” as a certain way of facilitation that is supposed to have the capacity of making emerge the collective intelligence that people possess. As an approach to facilitation, The Art of Hosting is focused on “improved, conscious, and kind ways of growing a capacity to support a deliberate wisdom, unique to being together,” and also relies on a specific attitude to process organization. The practitioners see this methodology of engagement as a way to bring people in complex, social systems into convergence on collective actions, with the participants discovering and proposing their own solutions.
