“Our financial transactions say a lot about what’s going on in our lives,” said Northeastern University Professor David Choffnes, who specializes in computer science and privacy issues.

“The response from the collective community has been swift and very transparent,” said James Heathers, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston and a specialist in forensic analytics, which is concerned with error detection in research data. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Experts from Northeastern University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and California State University, Long Beach also participated in the research.

But is containment realistic? Success will depend in part on whether infected people who don’t have symptoms can spread the virus. Asymptomatic people are hard to find and isolate, so if they can spread disease, 2019-nCoV “will be very difficult to stop in China,” says Alessandro Vespignani, a modeler of infectious diseases at Northeastern University. 

John Wihbey, assistant professor of journalism and media innovation at Northeastern University, said given the massive shift in newsgathering over the last 15 years, it’s understandable that young people aren’t as accepting of traditional broadcast news as earlier generations.

A database compiled by The Associated Press, USA TODAY and Northeastern University shows there were more mass killings in 2019 than any other year dating back to at least the 1970s.

The idea is called “obscurity” and it means taking steps to stop your personal information from being so readily available online to, well, just anyone, says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.

“I worry that what we’re seeing is more showboating and a quarantine to look tough,” said Wendy Parmet, a Northeastern University law professor and health policy expert. “Quarantines and travel bans have a really, really ugly history. Everyone always wants to do it when people are scared. But the downsides are high and the risks […]

“Until you deploy something in the actual situation, there’s always the possibility that no matter how the designers tested it, there could be something that they didn’t anticipate that creates a problem,” said Stephen S. Intille, a professor at Northeastern University who teaches about human-computer interactions.

Lewiston native David Roux announced last week he has partnered with Northeastern University to start the Roux Institute, a graduate school and research center focused on artificial intelligence and digital sciences and has donated $100 million to it.

WGBH Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with Northeastern University law professor and WGBH News legal analyst Daniel Medwed to take a deeper dive into the case and the SJC’s decision.

Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Northeastern University who studies voting behavior, campaigns, and political psychology, said people should consider how much information, and what kind, they need about each candidate to make a voting decision, and once you reach that threshold, take a step back.