MIT leaders extol importance of humanities at annual MITHIC event
Many of this year’s projects incorporated artificial intelligence and machine learning
Samuel Yuan–The Tech
At the second annual MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) event on Monday, Nov. 17, an array of speakers composed of MIT professors, deans, and administrators extolled the importance of the humanities and interdisciplinary thinking.
MITHIC, which was formed last fall, is one of President Sally Kornbluth’s signature initiatives and aims to promote the arts, humanities, and social sciences. With $3 million in annual funds for programs and research projects, MITHIC anchors a broader Institute-wide effort to bolster MIT’s humanities programs.
Through these efforts, the administration may be trying to address external perceptions of MIT as a “STEM school.” For instance, the new 2025 Carnegie Classifications reclassified MIT under its “Special Focus: Technology, Engineering, and Sciences” category, unlike many peer institutions that are classified as “Mixed.”
This year’s event showcased the range of multidisciplinary work funded by MITHIC, including a project on “socio-culturally aware AI” that emerged from a collaboration between the Anthropology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) departments.
Provost Anantha Chandrakasan and President Kornbluth delivered the opening remarks for this event.
“MITHIC is about inspiring our community to think differently and work together in new ways. It’s about embedding human-centered thinking throughout our research and innovation,” said Chandrakasan. “One year in, MITHIC is off to a strong start, advancing work across the Institute on global challenges.”
Kornbluth echoed the Provost’s sentiment and noted that MITHIC offers a unique outlet for philanthropists and alumni donors who wish to “drive new and unexpected collaborations.” According to Kornbluth, in 2025, the initiative received 89 proposals and funded 31 of them; it also received nearly 80 proposals for 2026, which are currently under review.
Kornbluth also expressed hope that MITHIC would further faculty and student research in numerous high-impact fields, including artificial intelligence, by grounding them in the “wisdom of the humanities.”
Indeed, AI was one of the big words of the day. Dean of the Sloan School of Management Richard M. Locke PhD ’89 centered part of his keynote address around the humanization of work and its crucial role in managing generative AI.
Quoting research from Sloan Professor Roberto Rigobon PhD ’97, Locke said that “empathy, presence, opinion, creativity and hope” will “increas[e] in value as AI advances.” He reasoned that initiatives like MITHIC would be important to “upskill workers with a focus on the fundamental qualities of human nature.”
During a fireside chat at the event, Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Agustín Rayo PhD ’01 added that skills related to the humanities — like communication and leadership — are becoming nearly as important as technical skills, partly because “human judgment” is becoming increasingly critical as mundane tasks get automated.
“I don’t think we need to abandon the idea that we’re the world’s top technical institution,” Rayo said. Instead, he believes that soft skills are a crucial “part of what it means to be a top engineer in the age of AI.”
Following the talks by administrators, professors held sessions explaining their MITHIC-funded work. This included a presentation on the Compass program, an undergraduate class exploring “fundamental questions about moral and social life,” by Professor of Political Science Lily L. Tsai. Also featured were the “Great Books” initiative by Professor of Philosophy Kieran Setiya and a partial screening of a film about “Bengali Harlem” created by Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Writing Vivek Bald.
The research projects on display, which spanned over six departments, also included work on the material composition of historic musical instruments, climate justice, and research on “scalable and ethical AI for health diagnostics in low-resource settings” done, in part, by Nobel Prize-winning Economics Professor Esther Duflo PhD ’99.
While presenting her work on AI and healthcare, done in partnership with EECS Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi PhD ’17 and others, Duflo explained that her team tested individuals for past silent heart attacks in India. They combined economics, in the form of cost-benefit analysis, and machine learning to accomplish this in a novel and cost-effective way.
She illustrated the life-saving potential of this multidisciplinary work, saying, “What is remarkable compared to existing tests is that it catches young people who are less likely to have had a silent heart attack, but may have many years of life saved.”