Usama Fayyad, executive director of Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence, told Northeastern Global News the term “hallucination” attributes “too much to the model,” including intent and consciousness, which AI bots do not have.

William Miles, a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, had considered the selection of an U.S.-born pope a dark-horse possibility as a “theo-political” response to social policies in the United States with which Pope Francis had expressed dismay.

John P. Wihbey, director of the AI-media strategies lab at Northeastern University in Boston, told Reuters on Monday that Trump is exploiting an “uncharted territory,” which is the “merging of social media and AI power, organized for political power and narrative dominance.”

Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of The New York Times, teaches journalism at Northeastern University and is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.

The other panelists were: Michelle Anderson, president and CEO of Junior Achievement of Maine; Mufalo Chitam, executive director of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition; Andrea Cianchette Maker, co-founder and president of FocusMaine; and Liz Kohler, managing director of strategy, operations and growth, at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute.

Economist Alicia Modestino of Northeastern University is also affiliated with J-PAL. For decades, she says, the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program has aimed “to reduce inequality of opportunity by increasing access to early employment experiences for disadvantaged youth.” 

(An easy way to think of this, says Laura Lewis, an engineer at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, is as a measure of the effort needed to prise a magnet off a steel filing cabinet).

In collaboration with the city of Chelsea and the local non-profit GreenRoots, scientists and engineers at Northeastern University, which is funding the study, installed these sensors near homes, schools, workplaces, and outside of grocery stores during an 18-month period between the fall of 2023 to the spring of 2025.

“I think we are seeing a new phenomenon – the merging of social media and AI power, organized for political power and narrative dominance,” said John Wihbey, director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab at Northeastern University in Boston.

“Why would anyone volunteer for that type of a trial?” says Mansoor Amiji, professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University. “Why would I want to be getting a saline solution when a vaccine is already out there?”