Chile president visits MIT, tours Media Lab
Courtesy of Dominick Reuter/MIT
Chile president visits MIT, tours Media Lab
Chilean President Sebastián Piñera visited the MIT Media Lab last Friday to give a speech in front of an audience consisting primarily of Chilean students in the Boston area. Piñera encouraged his audience members to return to their native country, Chile, after completing their education. Piñera addressed his audience in Spanish.
“Chile needs your education, the skills you’ve acquired here,” Piñera said, according to the MIT News Office. “That’s what will make a difference in our economy going forward.”
Piñera admitted that he had a “deep but healthy jealousy” for the students who had the opportunity to study “at one of the best universities in the world.”
Piñera had met with MIT President Susan J. Hockfield prior to his speech, followed by a tour of the Media Lab led by and Alexander Simoes G and Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences César A. Hidalgo. Hidalgo and Simoes demonstrated their work with the Economic Complexity Observatory, a collaborative project meant to develop tools that can help visualize large amounts of data for macroeconomic decision making.
—Derek Chang