Blog
Boxing isn’t like other sports. It activates the lizard brain; the fight-or-flight response, primal fear. Search “boxing fear psychology” and you’ll find a wealth of interesting content. From the military academies preparing young minds to face the traumas of war to urban community centers helping kids escape drug violence, boxing transforms lives in ways that may seem absurd to the uninitiated.
The Yarn is an MIT Sloan tradition of sharing personal stories that have shaped our lives. In this Yarn, Mark Weber shares his formative experience as a special needs counselor at SpringHill Camps, a Christian summer camp in Michigan with an integrated program promoting inclusion and learning.
Some 40 leaders in child care from all over the world were in the room, and the consensus was clear from the outset: short-term volunteering in orphanages are bad for kids.
There is legitimate cause for concern with regard to World Vision's work with child sponsorship, shipping of donated goods, and poverty imagery in commercials.
Sometimes aid is most harmful when it does reach the people. This an other insights from the making over Poverty, Inc.
Indeed, poverty is infinitely complex and there are no convenient singularities. The project of Poverty, Inc. is embrace that complexity and eschew silver bullets. “It’s easy to have a heart for the poor,” says development expert Michael Fairbanks in the film. “But can we have a mind for the poor? That’s the challenge.”
“When I see the country heads drive around in their posh cars and living in their big houses,” echoes Ghanaian software entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse in Poverty, Inc., “I see multiple colonial governors. We are held captive by the donor community.”
Very few people ever take notice of one of the key drivers of illegal immigration: poverty in the developing world fueled by U.S. agricultural subsidies and crony capitalist trade policies supported by Republicans and Democrats alike.
We heard two big bangs about 50 yards ahead. My friends grabbed me, their guest, tightly and the rickshaw driver halted abruptly. People were running and yelling, but it seemed no one was hurt from the explosions. Just mini-bombs, meant to frighten, not to injure. A few moments later, we were bouncing along again as if nothing had happened. But that was just the beginning.
The rural areas of Bangladesh are breathtakingly beautiful in both scenery and culture, but they are very difficult, and sometimes nearly deadly to traverse.
Public Speaking
Mark Weber delivers a keynote address for the inaugural Harambean Global Summit. In 2008, spurred by some personal advice from then Senator Obama, Okendo Lewis-Gayle founded the Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit on the African continent. Piloted by the Swahili message, “Let’s all put together,” the alliance has become the largest and most powerful network of African ventures, collectively valued at over $1 billion, with over $400 million in investment and support from Y Combinator, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, CISCO, and others.
Mark Weber presents at the Disruptive Tech Virtual Summit, an invite-only event for corporate board members seeking deeper knowledge of artificial intelligence and other cutting edge technologies. In this talk, Mark puts a spotlight on scalability as a key challenge in execution of AI for enterprise-scale applications, highlighting cutting edge work coming out of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
We've seen a rapid and exciting acceleration of work on graph convolutional networks, or GCN's. With GCNs, we begin with certain attributes to describe the nodes and edges, and we use convolutions over the graph to pull out the hidden properties and patterns. In this talk at the ShiftAI conference, Mark Weber explains how GCN’s work and how they can be used in real-world applications like anti-money laundering.
Mark Weber presents on blockchain technology and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative at Ciudad de Las Ideas in Puebla, Mexico.
Mark Weber presents on AI, COVID-19, and the Future of Work for a global virtual audience organized by the Impact Foundation in Poland. We’ve known for a while now that the Future of Work in an increasingly digital economy requires us to make significant, rapid changes to the way we educate our people and conduct our affairs in business, government, and society. But COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the timeline.
Mark Weber of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab speaks at the AI in Finance Summit in New York City. Here he shares his motivation for working on financial applications of artificial intelligence to make positive social impact.
Graph deep learning could be a powerful tool in anti-money laundering because it can capture hidden information in complex networks. In this presentation at the KDD Anomaly Detection in Finance Workshop, Mark Weber presents a tutorial paper, "Anti-Money Laundering in Bitcoin: Experimenting with Graph Convolutional Networks for Financial Forensics."
"Scalable Graph Learning for Anti-Money Laundering: A First Look." Organized crime inflicts human suffering on a genocidal scale: the Mexican drug cartels have murdered 150,000 people since 2006, upwards of 700,000 people per year are "exported" in a human trafficking industry enslaving an estimated 40 million people. Mark Weber presents a "first look" at graph convolutional networks (GCN) for finance and anti-money laundering at the Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
NYU's Development Research Institute hosted a public screening of the new hit documentary film, Poverty, Inc. The screening was followed by an in-depth question and answer session between DRI Director William Easterly, film-makers Michael Matheson Miller and Mark Weber, and the audience.
NYU's Development Research Institute hosted a public screening of the new hit documentary film, Poverty, Inc. The screening was followed by an in-depth question and answer session between DRI Director William Easterly, film-makers Michael Matheson Miller and Mark Weber, and the audience.
NYU's Development Research Institute hosted a public screening of the new hit documentary film, Poverty, Inc. The screening was followed by an in-depth question and answer session between DRI Director William Easterly, film-makers Michael Matheson Miller and Mark Weber, and the audience.
NYU's Development Research Institute hosted a public screening of the new hit documentary film, Poverty, Inc. The screening was followed by an in-depth question and answer session between DRI Director William Easterly, film-makers Michael Matheson Miller and Mark Weber, and the audience.
NYU's Development Research Institute hosted a public screening of the new hit documentary film, Poverty, Inc. The screening was followed by an in-depth question and answer session between DRI Director William Easterly, film-makers Michael Matheson Miller and Mark Weber, and the audience.
The Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance alliance has become the largest and most powerful network of African ventures, collectively valued at over $1 billion. This is the transcript of Mark Weber’s keynote address to kick off the inaugural Harambeans Global Summit.