Wentworth
Institute of Technology
617-989-4040
Associate Professor, School of Engineering
Stress and anxiety is becoming most common experience for most people. Instead of dealing with these, people started to get lost and started to fail more. To be able to deal with such challenges this book showed me the power of positive thinking, power of caring, power of breaks and power of collaborating. By using the power of focusing on the positive things and believing in success, we can overcome any obstacles in our life! Use the power of taking break, take a look at this book, you will not regret!
Associate Professor, School of Computing and Data Science
Thinking about books that have an impact on me, Last Chance to See is the first one that comes to mind. This witty non-fiction account reports Douglas Adams’s journey with zoologist Mark Carwardine visiting species around the world that are becoming extinct. While I find it heartbreaking that since the work’s debut in the late 1980s, a few of these species are already possibly extinct, Adams's humorous writing keeps me revisiting this work. The topic is relevant now more than ever due to the effects of climate change. Through an act of cosmic serendipity, my doctoral research ended up being on evolutionary algorithms, which are nature-inspired algorithms for solving complex black-box problems. My dissertation advisor and I modeled biogeographical migrations of spices in search of better habitats for survival to find solutions to optimization problems. Applying one of my favorite authors’ works and the theory of evolution to solve computational problems was not only fulfilling but also illustrative of the interdisciplinarity of social and computational fields. This light-hearted yet thought-provoking work can be a valuable resource for anyone beyond the zoological field.
Associate Professor, School of Computing and Data Science
This book is a must-read! I thoroughly enjoyed the real-world examples explained in this book. The decision we make is affecting our life due to the emergence of big data. It's very well-written and easy to follow and manages to tell clear stories about how the software we use to assess teacher performance or insurance risk is all too often encoded with the prejudices and blind spots of the people who make it. As a Mathematician interested in data science, the one thing that I love about this book is a depth explanation of how software products might avoid these unclear results. If you are interested to see how big data is affecting the world we live in and would like to know how incorrectly interpreting can lead to a completely new direction, I strongly recommend reading WMD book!
Professor, School of Computing and Data Science
There are perspectives that did not register with me as a student that now I recognize as a professor, and there are emotions that I never understood as a daughter that I acknowledge after becoming a mother. In the same manner, I discover something new in this book whenever I read it. When I first read this book as a teenager, it felt like an old novel that I could not relate, but when I read it again in my twenties, I fell in love with the dreamy and adventurous protagonist who I felt was very different from myself. In my thirties when the life was fierce and I was fighting depression, this book comforted me and brought me hope. I anticipate how this book will inspire me differently in my forties when I read it yet again.
