Media Lab researchers have teamed up with UNICEF on a new website that uses AI to show what cities would look like if they had gone through the war in Syria. As Timothy Revell notes in New Scientist, “such destruction is hard to imagine and can lead to fewer people contributing to fundraising campaigns,” which is something the researchers hope this project will change.
New York Times reporter Randy Kennedy writes about “The Enemy,” a virtual reality project created by Prof. Fox Harrell and Visiting Scholar Ben Khelifa that is aimed at allowing visitors to learn from individuals on both sides of long-standing conflicts. The project “holds the promise of opening up new frontiers for the integration of journalism and art,” writes Kennedy.
New York Times reporter Jeneen Interlandi examines Dr. Emile Bruneau’s work studying regional conflicts to better understand how human empathy works. Bruneau explains that he felt that “the most relevant level of analysis for generating social change was the psychological level.”