Intended to convene scholars in all fields for short-term collaborations, Exploratory and Advanced Seminars at the Radcliffe Institute offer resources to Harvard faculty and their colleagues at other universities to develop new ideas.

Proposals for seminars during the academic year or summer must be submitted to the Institute by Harvard ladder faculty. Former Radcliffe Institute fellows are invited to submit proposals for summer exploratory seminars.

Below is a listing of the latest Exploratory and Advanced Seminars in science.

Summer and Fall 2007
Spring and Summer 2008


Summer and Fall 2007

July 31–August 4
Higgsless Electroweak Symmetry Breaking in the Large Hadron Collider–Era
Exploratory Seminar; Science

Elizabeth H. Simmons RI ’01 (Physics, Michigan State University)

One of the most significant problems in elementary particle physics is the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking. Experiments have determined the masses of the elementary fermions (the quarks and leptons) and the masses of the W and Z bosons that transmit the weak nuclear force. However, the dynamic that produces these masses and separates the weak interactions from electromagnetism—thereby breaking the electroweak gauge symmetry—has not been identified.

At present, there is a working theory—the Standard Model of particle physics—that describes the elementary particles and forces but does not explain the dynamics responsible for the generation of mass. Due to the limitations of the Standard Model, theorists are looking beyond it for a deeper understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking and are creating new models whose experimental consequences can be tested at the Fermilab’s (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) Tevatron Collider in Chicago and the Large Hadron Collider now under construction at CERN in Geneva.

This exploratory summer seminar will bring together a group of twelve theorists with expertise in two strands of inquiry that have shown promise for revealing the origin of mass. These theories include new strong dynamics at experimentally accessible energies and the presence of extra space-time dimensions. The seminar participants are aware of and influenced by one another’s published work, but many have not collaborated with one another recently (or ever). Bringing them together for intensive and focused discussions on new models and their experimental implications will create a collaborative effort of greatly increased scope and impact.

November 9–10
Next-Generation Statistical Models and Inference for Speech and Audio Signal Processing
Exploratory Seminar; Science

Patrick J. Wolfe (Electrical Engineering, Harvard University)

The goal of this multidisciplinary exploratory seminar is to bring together computer scientists, engineers, and statisticians to advance the theory and practice of probabilistic modeling of information-carrying natural sound signals.

Despite decades of intensive research in a variety of disciplines, a fundamental mathematical characterization of the class of natural sound signals—speech in particular—remains elusive. The scientific community still lacks a rigorous mathematical foundation to describe the physiological continuum of speech sounds, and a corresponding framework to characterize the signal pathway from production to perception.

A description of speech sounds based on statistical modeling will enable a coherent treatment of a variety of phenomena, from signal processing to speech communication to auditory neuroscience. Both applied numerical harmonic analysis and the statistical tools of functional data analysis provide a means of addressing this challenge; in turn, advances in audio signal modeling stand to impact both scientific understanding and engineering applications, including those in speech and hearing science as well as those in signal processing and communications.

January 11–12
On History and Deep Time
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science

Daniel L. Smail (History, Harvard University)
Andrew Shryock (Anthropology, University of Michigan)

This exploratory seminar is designed to bring together scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and human sciences for the purpose of having a conversation about time.

At the center of the discussion will be the gap that currently exists between the short chronology of the humanities/social sciences and the deep time of the natural sciences that are concerned with humanity’s deep history. As an intellectual matter, this gap is the product of the fact that the discipline of human history has yet to come to terms with the time revolution of the 1860s, when time came to be understood as stretching far beyond the 6,000 years posited by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Taking their cue from history, other branches of the humanities and social sciences also operate within the span of time afforded by the short chronology. In the wake of the paleoanthropological and genetic revolution that has taken place over the past two decades, it has become ever more important for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to learn to think with deep time. At the same time, the fields that comprise paleoanthropology and human population genetics have only just begun to explore narrative devices for linking the deep past to the recent past.

This exploratory seminar is part of a long-term effort to bring about reunion of scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and human sciences.

March 28–29
From Promise to Reality: Appropriate Contexts for the Use of Mycorrhizal Fungi as Organic Fertilizers
Advanced Seminar; Science

Anne Pringle (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University)

The mycorrhizal fungi are a diverse group of species that grow in association with plant roots. Because they provide crucial elements to plants (phosphorus and nitrogen), these fungi hold great promise as organic fertilizers. Basic and applied research on the symbioses has exploded in the last decade. (According to the Web of Science, 8,799 papers using mycorrhizal were published in 2006.) However, applications of this knowledge to human endeavors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem restoration) have met with only sporadic success. Similarly, efforts to use this work to advance the basic sciences of ecology and evolution remain in their earliest stages.

During the past two years, a group of scientists has been making a concerted effort to synthesize the data and move the field from a descriptive to a predictive science. Two publications are finished, and five more are in progress.

May 2–3
IP without IP
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science

Mario Biagioli (History of Science, Harvard University)
Rochelle Dreyfuss (Law, New York University School of Law)

In the last ten years or so, intellectual property has gone from being a little-known part of the law to becoming a household term. The ubiquity of intellectual property in popular discourse has led to an intriguing (if problematic) transformation of its cultural meaning. Intellectual property remains a technical (and expanding) branch of the law, but it has also become a cultural emblem—a catch-all category standing for an extraordinary range of practices within the new information society. The very concept of knowledge (including notions of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage) have been often recast into IP—a category that is often much more extensive than (and sometimes even incongruous with) the actual domain of intellectual property law.

Taking the cultural reification of the concept of intellectual property as its starting point, “IP without IP” brings together scholars from legal studies, anthropology, economics, history of science, literature, business, and science to analyze the many ways in which intellectual property concerns are in fact often managed not through the tools provided by intellectual property law, but through specific relations between people, professional customs, etc. Through a range of empirical case studies, we want to question the conceptualization of IP as a form of property applicable to (or projectable on) an ever-widening range of products and claims by showing how access to and protection of knowledge and cultural productions can be achieved (and has been achieved) without resorting to the law. We do not present these practices as opposed to legally codified IP, but as elements of a landscape of social practices that include IP law and from which it could draw to reinvent itself in the face of mounting and widespread criticism.