HM Alumni Illuminate Book Day Discussions
Alumni played a pivotal role at Book Day 2023, a long-treasured annual event that came roaring back after a three-year pandemic hiatus. The designated book – Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang – offered a collection of science fiction/fantasy short stories that touched on the themes of beauty, religion, artificial intelligence, ethics, mathematics, art, psychology, and communication, among other topics.
James Grimmelman ’95 participated in a conversation with author Ted Chiang. (Photo credit: Barry Mason)
James Grimmelman ’95 is the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. He helps lawyers and technologists understand each other, applying ideas from computer science to problems in law and vice versa. James participated in the closing assembly in a conversation about machine learning and machine intelligence with the author of Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang.
Isa Jamira Moise ’15 was intrigued by the first short story in the book, “Tower of Babylon,” in which dwellers sustained themselves growing food vertically, scaling up and down the tower. Isa led a workshop called, “Urban Gardening,” which touched upon techniques for growing food in environments with extreme conditions. In her spare time, Isa is designing and building a self-sustaining agricultural school that incorporates indigenous knowledge into educating individuals how to take care of themselves and the earth.
Neurosurgeon Scott Simon, HM Class of 1989, was a participant at Book Day 2023. (Photo credit: Barry Mason)
Scott Simon ’89, a neurosurgeon who practices in Stamford, CT, led a workshop entitled, “A Neurosurgeon's Perspective on the Evaluation and Management of Acute Traumatic Brain Injury.” Scott spoke about the pathophysiology of acute traumatic brain injury and the neurosurgical evaluation and management of these cases. The discussion touched upon how brain injuries occur and how they can be prevented, the challenges of neuronal repair, and the development of interventions to treat these patients, one of the topics in Stories of Your Life and Others.