In July, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, and her colleagues published a review of more than 1,000 studies that concluded many developments in artificial intelligence and computer vision that aim to detect emotions are misguided.

“Anything that prevents voters from learning where candidates stand on issues is detrimental to democracy,” said Costas Panagopoulos, professor and interim chair of the department of political science at Northeastern University. “If [candidates] have a view before the election, they shouldn’t be prevented from sharing it.”

The nitty-gritty of exactly which user sees which ad is ultimately automated, and computers are getting increasingly sophisticated at matching users, channels and ads, according to Christo Wilson, a researcher who studies YouTube at Northeastern University.

A separate study from Northeastern University and Imperial College London last month reached a similar conclusion: Roku and Amazon Fire TV, along with smart TVs from manufacturers like LG and Samsung, were sharing viewer data with Netflix and other advertisers, even when the devices were not configured with Netflix accounts.

Communications aimed at furthering an illegal act also are not covered by attorney-client privilege, said Daniel Medwed, a professor of criminal law at Northeastern University School of Law.

At rival Facebook, the algorithms that automatically match ads to viewers and content are rapidly improving, according Alan Mislove, colleague of Wilson’s at Northeastern University.

But that’s not the whole story, according to Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at the Northeastern University School of Law. While the companies who made, marketed and distributed the drugs engaged in “plenty of wrongdoing,” the narrative that drug companies are solely to blame absolves the regulators whose job it was […]

Leo Beletsky, a professor at Northeastern University who has spearheaded this data collection, attributes this to a prosecutorial culture of “cherry picking” cases for “performative” purposes. “If you’re a prosecutor in a rural Pennsylvania county, the story you want to tell your constituents is that people from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are coming into your community and poisoning […]

Kimberly A. Eddleston, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University and a senior editor on the EIX Editorial Board of the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis (EIX is a funder of Next Avenue).

“The very definition of substance-use disorder is continued and compulsive use despite negative consequences,” said Leo Beletsky, who heads the Health in Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University in Boston. It’s not productive, he said, to threaten jail for people “whose disorder by definition makes them less responsive to those consequences.”

But Barry Bluestone, director of Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy and the lead author of a 2013 report studying the impact of the Life Sciences Center, said it would be “shortsighted” to pull the plug on the Capital Program.

Daniel Medwed, professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University School of Law, said a fallback defense strategy in any case is to develop “mitigation evidence” — often hardships — to demonstrate extenuating circumstances.