Another year on the cutting edge

This fall, Harvard will help lead the third annual HUBweek festival celebrating the region’s commitment to innovation in the arts and sciences. The University, along with The Boston Globe, MIT, and Massachusetts General Hospital, is a founding supporter of the weeklong festival.

With its world-renowned universities, hospitals, and arts organizations, Greater Boston has long been a draw for creative thinkers.

“HUBweek offers an opportunity to showcase Boston to the wider world,” said Harvard Provost Alan M. Garber. “Harvard embraces the creative forces that enable innovation and discovery in Boston, Cambridge, and beyond. We are excited to participate once again in this unique collaboration.”

The festival will begin Oct. 10 and feature symposia, lectures, and interactive events examining a wide range of topics.

A session created by the Center for Research on Computation and Society at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Harvard Business School will focus on digital health, precision medicine, technology, and management. The symposium, “Building the Future of Health Technology,” will present a series of talks by researchers, and will invite attendees to participate in a health care case study led by HBS faculty.

“The case study offers guests a unique opportunity to understand how the business and technical pieces of innovation in health care go hand in hand,” said the center’s director, Margo Seltzer, the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at SEAS.

Innovation is at the core of Harvard’s i-lab, which will open its doors for a startup showcase featuring current and alumni ventures, as well as a speaker event highlighting the importance of storytelling in a successful business launch.

“Success in business is often made or broken by an entrepreneur’s ability to clearly articulate their ideas in a compelling way that connects to his or her audience,” said Jodi Goldstein, Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Managing Director of the i-lab. “Developing your personal brand and original story is absolutely essential, and we are very excited to share strategies for doing so with our guests.”

On Oct. 13, Harvard Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) Project Zero will launch its yearlong 50th anniversary by hosting a special Askwith Forum.

Project Zero is an HGSE research center that focuses on arts and learning. This forum will explore major shifts over the past five decades in ideas about creativity and intelligence, and the implications of these changes for schools and society. Scheduled speakers include Harvard President Drew Faust, HGSE Dean James E. Ryan, and Project Zero co-founders Howard Gardner and David Perkins.

“This is a fantastic opportunity to explore and reflect on how our perceptions of how our minds work have changed over the past 50 years,” said Daniel Wilson, director of Project Zero. “The role of education in today’s complex world requires us to take stock in what we know about the human mind and consider how to best cultivate citizens of tomorrow. We look forward to sharing views on major insights, and discussing implications for educators from current luminary thinkers in our field.”

On Oct. 13 and 14, the Harvard Art Museums will highlight the special exhibition “The Philosophy Chamber” during a symposium titled “The Room Where It Happens: On the Agency of Interior Spaces.” The chamber, which was on the second floor of Harvard Hall from 1766 to 1820, was intended as a space for teaching science but evolved into a hub for artists, scientists, and intellectuals to discuss the room’s artifacts, scientific instruments, and art objects.

“Although this collection was assembled 200 years ago, it is very much alive with questions that are not only important for us to address but also very much part of our work on this campus today. It’s not a curiosity or relic from the past. It brims with relevancy,” said curator Ethan Lasser, who is also the head of the Division of European and American Art and the Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Curator of American Art at the museums.

The chamber-inspired symposium, to feature a keynote lecture by Professor Louis Nelson of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, will focus on the concept of rooms as generators of ideas.

According to Laura Turner Igoe, the Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art and the symposium’s co-organizer, ‘“The Room Where It Happens’ will offer new perspectives on spaces of artistic, artisanal, and intellectual production throughout history. Presentations will investigate issues of access, ideology, cross-cultural exchange, and virtuality, which are themes also explored in the Philosophy Chamber exhibition.”

All Harvard-hosted HUBweek events are free and open to the public. For more on the festival, click here.