4-15-2021

CAMPUS TOURS, 2

SUMMER HOUSING, 3

BOSTON POLICE, 5

MONTHLY PLAYLISTS, 6

Students take head to Comm.

Ave.

Housing remains limited to doubles, singles.

BPD overtime budget is an unacceptable abuse of power.

Why you should curate a monthly playlist.

C ELEBRATIN G

THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 2021

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THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY

J O U R NA LI S M

YEAR LI. VOLUME C. ISSUE XI

BU students help launch educational Content Creation Lab for teens Juncheng Quan Daily Free Press Staff Boston University students working with the Global Nomads Group — an international nonprofit organization that aims to connect young people around the world via the internet — have started a new initiative known as the Content Creation Lab to allow teenagers and students aged 13 to 19 years old to create educational content to share with their peers.

The New York-based Global Nomads Group intends to foster “cross-cultural dialogue within youth all over the world,” according to Intern Coordinator and Program CoLeader Ezgi Eyigor, a senior studying psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Under the guidance of interns, Eyigor said, adolescents from countries around the globe — including Ecuador, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa — create videos and learning modules to share their knowledge and experiences on a variety of topics with other students.

“Content Creation Lab was created in order to give the power to youth,” Eyigor said, “to create for youth, to design for youth.”

The four main issues covered in the last year were human rights, sports, mental health and women’s rights, she said, adding that the topics were

chosen by the participating youth themselves.

Eyigor said the Lab was born when she and her fellow interns tried and failed to find an educational video on the concept of social biases and how to overcome them.

“We were looking for a video that could help us out with talking about bias and how it works in our brain and in our personal lives,” Eyigor said.

“We just couldn’t find one.”

Aiming to further the mission of international education for youths under the GNG, Eyigor said she and her associates decided to simply make one of their own.

“Long story short, we produced,” Eyigor said, “and it was a lot of back and forth, it was a lot of sleepless nights with looking at my computer for hours. But at the end of the day, we created something beautiful.”

She said that process inspired them to think about how they could allow for students and teens to be more directly involved in creating this type of content.

“We were saying, ‘why are we the ones that are producing this content?”

Eyigor said, “‘why are we not giving the tools and the resources and the support to the youth to create for youth, whether that was the written content or the video content?’”

Katie O’Rourke, a junior studying film and television in the College of Communication and a production and editing intern at GNG, said she joined the team to help edit these

COURTESY OF ALEXAS_FOTOS VIA FLICKR

Boston University students worked with nonprofit Global Nomads Group to kickstart the Content Creation Lab, which allows teenagers to create educational material that will be shared with peers across the globe.

educational videos.

“The ideas for the videos came from the youth that were participating in the Content Creation Lab,” O’Rourke said. “They came up with the ideas for the videos, we help them brainstorm and work through them to then end up with a final product.”

O’Rourke said the GNG aims to produce educational content that isn’t “talked about in a classroom setting,” and provide their custom curriculums to schools and organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, with hopes of spotlighting youth voices.

As of now, O’Rourke noted their content is only accessible on the GNG

curriculum.

Amanda Reiling, a former CCL human rights team leader and a recent international relations and affairs graduate from the University of Georgia, said the videos were aimed to be integrated with other mediums.

“We wanted to correlate the written content and the video content in a creative way,” Reiling said, “to where it’s engaging, it’s short but still informative to youth.”

She said the videos are created in different formats that allow for adolescents around the world to visually share certain aspects of their lives that reflect the learning goals of

the GNG. “We’ve had interview style, vlog style,” Reiling said. “The videos themselves are pretty short, I’d say most of them are under five minutes, if not all of them.”

Eyigor said she hoped the CCL encourages young people to learn and connect with their peers.

“My biggest goal for Content Creation Lab is to reach youth that are not able to travel, to have the experience, to have that fostering, nourishing experience,” Eyigor said, “to work in cross-national teams and learn to collaborate with different people from all over the world.”

Dredging aimed to preserve Back Bay Fens’ Muddy River Samuele Petruccelli Daily Free Press Staff

In an effort involving city, state and federal government agencies, along with a local citizen committee, the Back Bay Fens’ Muddy River is in the midst of a restoration project that could have lasting impacts on the watershed’s flow, quality and biodiversity.

Managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, phase two of the project began last June with contractors dredging between one and eight feet of sediment from the river bed.

Tuesday night, the Colleges of the Fenway Center for Sustainability and the Environment held its 15th annual Muddy River Symposium, in which student researchers presented their work on the tributary.

The Maintenance and Management Oversight Committee, a citizens committee tasked with helping supervise progress and future needs of the landscape, met Wednesday night, providing updates on the restoration.

In an interview, Frances Gershwin, who serves as the chairperson of the MMOC, described water quality improvement as one of several goals of the committee.

“Definitely a local Boston, Brookline, Commonwealth goal: improvement of water quality and institution of best management practices with respect to stormwater management,”

Gershwin said.

While the Charles River scored high marks in a 2019 Environmental Protection Agency report, the federal agency assigned the Muddy River tributary a D- rating due to high traces of E. Coli and other bacteria. Erica Holm, field operations coordinator at the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, noticed that grade.

“The Muddy River is currently the worst water quality tributary of any of the tributaries that go into the Charles,” Holm said. “This project itself has been needed for over a decade.”

Addressing the goals of the MMOC, Gershwin, who also presented at the symposium, pointed to the committee’s ability to navigate layers of government jurisdiction to succeed.

“There’s always a tension,” Gershwin said. “Sometimes our function is really being a watchdog, but our goal is to be collaborative as much as possible and to support what the governmental agencies are doing.”

In guiding those agencies, Gershwin said the committee attempts to develop collaborative relationships.

“It’s not just, ‘You have to do this,’” Gershwin said. “What gets you through the tension is developing good, solid, supportive working relationships, and we have worked very long and very hard to make that happen.”

Such a dedication to partnership has been noticed by those outside the committee, including Director of

the Colleges of the Fenway Center for Sustainability and the Environment Cynthia Williams, who said its work is “a model for citizen oversight.”

Williams added the collaboration at Tuesday’s event mirrored that of the committee.

“It’s sort of in the consortium’s sense of identity to do things in a multi-institutional way,” Williams said. “We can derive environmentally relevant knowledge from any discipline, and it’s got to be all hands on deck.”

Associate Professor of biology at Simmons University Anna Aguilera, who also attended the symposium, observed the dynamic of students in a breakout session that focused on projects related to the Muddy River.

“There was this really cool synergy with what these kids were doing,” Aguilera said. “Everyone was working on a similar problem at a different scale, but no one was repeating the wheel.”

In addition to researching across academic disciplines, Williams said higher-education institutions have a unique ability and responsibility to partner with local neighborhoods.

“We really need to get off the campus and into the communities,” Williams said. “There’s a real momentum to integrate what’s going on in the academic community with what’s going on right outside our doors.”

While dredging operations on the Muddy River are currently underway by the Army Corps of Engineers, Gautham Das, an associate professor of civil engineering at Wentworth In-

stitute of Technology, pointed in an interview to the potential presence of PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, as a looming problem in the watershed. PFAS are man-made chemicals that do not break down over time and can stimulate adverse health effects.

Although PFAS are often found in everyday items, there is evidence they can cause harmful effects on the human body. And according to Das, they may be present in the Muddy River.

“All those chemicals that are there on the leaves and on the surrounding areas leeches all of that out into the river, which forms PFAS,” Das said.

“When it’s released in water, it does go through the human body and it causes a lot of issues.”

But it’s not just humans that may have trouble ahead. Das said the process of dredging can have disastrous side effects on the wildlife and organic population.

“When you dredge the river, you kill everything else in there,” Das said.

“When you pull out all the sand from

it, what are you pulling out? All the fish, and the crab, and whatever and all the other stuff, and then they’re going to take it and they dump it somewhere else.”

In an interview, Holm advocated for ensuring that the Emerald Necklace — which includes surrounding parks and the Muddy River — is restored and preserved for posterity.

She said she approved of the Army Corps’ work.

“If we don’t take care of these resources, they may not be here for the next generation,” Holm said. “The really important thing to focus on is to look at the parks holistically, not necessarily segmented out park by park, but look at the whole of the green space and what it offers to people.”

Holm added that the park remains critically important as the pandemic continues.

“It’s really important that these parks are a place of escape,” Holm said. “Especially during COVID and during other crises that people may be going through in their personal lives.”

SHANNON DAMIANO | DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF

The Fens. Multiple government agencies and a local citizens committee are completing a restoration project to preserve the Back Bay Fens’ Muddy River, which the committee provided updates on in a Wednesday meeting.

2 NEWS

With in-person tours still canceled, prospective students visit BU’s campus on their own Emily Stevenson Daily Free Press Staff In lieu of in-person, official campus tours, Boston University is offering prospective students and families other ways to get a feel for Commonwealth Avenue.

Campus is open to self-guided tours, and a mobile walking tour is provided through the VisiTOUR app.

The walking tour also leads visitors to an online Back2BU guide on how to wear a mask in accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.

Along with the guided walking tour, the University is offering an interactive virtual tour, an option to register for a live virtual tour with student ambassadors and various virtual events for students to get to know BU and the campus.

“However, BU continues to maintain strict COVID protocols,” the website states, “which means that visitors are not permitted inside our buildings and, strict mask wearing and social distancing protocols are being followed.”

Sally Thoden, an admitted student in the College of Arts and Sciences from Austin, Texas, said she visited the campus in September to ensure that BU was the right choice for her.

“Although there were virtual tours and stuff like that,” Thoden said, “I just really wanted to make sure I was making the right decision, because it is a pretty big decision.”

Thoden was recruited by the BU Rowing Team and said she was given a map by her coach to explore campus and do a self-guided tour.

“I thought that was super helpful because I feel like BU’s campus is kind of tucked in,” she said. “I feel like without that map, I definitely would not have known what everything was and I think it’d be a lot more confusing.”

Thoden said she also took note of the COVID-19 safety displayed on campus while she was visiting.

“Everyone was wearing masks and everything,” she said, “so I definitely felt really safe.”

Cameron Howard, an admitted student in CAS from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said he is traveling to Boston next week to visit campus and decide whether he will attend BU. “I’ve been to Boston before but I’ve never been to BU,” Howard said. “I wanted to see the campus.”

Howard said he has completed the virtual tour and used the online resources, but they don’t provide the same experience as being on campus.

“I think seeing the campus is totally different,” Howard said. “You can really get a better feel versus just

SOPHIA FLISSLER/ DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF

A family tours the Boston University campus. Many prospective families have visited BU recently despite the cancelation of official tours, with some embarking on self-guided visits provided by the University.

looking at it online.”

He added he was particularly reassured by BU’s recent announcement of compulsory COVID-19 vaccinations for students next year.

“I feel really safe I think, especially because we just got the email a few days ago that they’re requiring all students be vaccinated for Fall,” Howard said. “I think that makes it a lot easier to go and feel safer.”

CAS sophomore Ruby Price works at the green badge station in the George Sherman Union and said she has had to refuse touring families who have tried to come into the

building.

“We’ve had to turn them away quite a few times,” Price said. “I feel bad because we want them to be able to tour the campus, but also we have to enforce the regulations.”

However, Price noted the families she’s seen have mostly been understanding and followed the guidelines.

“Most of them are pretty respectful about it,” Price said. “I don’t think it’s too big of a concern, personally.”

CAS freshman Jaedin Guldenstern said she understands why students feel the need to visit campus in-person.

“They just want some stability and knowing where they’re going next,” Guldenstern said, “so I can really empathize with that.”

As long as families are following COVID-19 guidelines, they should come to campus to make a more informed decision about where to attend college, Guldenstern added.

“I just would hope and ask and I have seen it so far,” she said, “that they’re being safe about it and respectful of us.”

The University could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.

Nonprofits aim to address worsened food insecurity in Boston Isabella Abraham Daily Free Press Staff

One year in, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to leave many Boston residents facing food insecurity. Local nonprofits, like Building Audacity, have since been distributing groceries to families in need.

Massachusetts saw the largest increase in food insecurity from 2018 to 2020 in the country, according to an October study by Feeding America.

“A lot of folks don’t realize how many folks were hungry before the pandemic,” said Nakia Navarro, founder of Building Audacity. “Now that the pandemic has hit, people are scratching their heads because it’s people that they didn’t think were living check-to-check.”

Unemployment in Boston hit record highs since the start of the pandemic and remains high today — compared to previous years — coinciding with more families struggling to eat, wrote Erin McAleer, CEO of Project Bread, in a statement to The Daily Free Press.

In June of last year, 90,609 Boston residents received food stamps via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program​— up more than 20% from ​75,355 residents that February, according to data from the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance. Data for April and May was unavailable.

“We are in the midst of a hunger crisis unlike any other in our lifetime,” McAleer wrote.

Catalina López-Ospina, director of the Mayor’s Office of Food Access, wrote in a statement that food insecurity in Boston most heavily impacted already vulnerable communities.

A fall 2020 report by Project Bread — a Massachusetts hunger advocacy group — found that one in three Black and Latino households in East Boston are facing food insecurity, which is double that of white households.

Disparities in food insecurity, López-Ospina added, make tailoring assistance programs essential to the specific needs of individual households.

“This is why ensuring access to culturally appropriate and nutritious food is a critical part of our equitable response and recovery from the pandemic,” López-Ospina wrote. “We will continue to create and strengthen a resilient network of food access for all Bostonians who need a helping hand.”

Navarro said hunger advocacy work has been “a very white space” for the past 20 years. Her organization, she said, is trying to find equitable solutions — “allowing the last and least heard actually to lead the conversation.”

For example, she said families who are facing food insecurity asked for more fresh produce and snacks for children, as more kids are learning from home — the local youth leadership nonprofit Building

Audacity responded as part of a larger COVID-19 relief effort.

“What we have been trying to do is give the most marginalized the best,” Navarro said. “We started doing our very best to find healthy, culturally appropriate food items for our folks, and that’s what we’re doing.”

School-aged children are greatly impacted by the pandemic, said Amanda Trombley, marketing manager at Food For Free. She said one in 11 Massachusetts children experienced food insecurity prior to the pandemic — but now it’s one in five.

“A lot of the places where they normally get food were closed until fairly recently,” Trombley said.

“Up until April 1, there were still a significant number of schools that were operating remotely, or at least partially remotely, throughout the state, and that just cut down on access to school lunches.”

Seniors who are food-insecure are another group hit hard by the pandemic, Trombley said. Official statistics may not reflect this because some elderly people feel a social stigma around requesting assistance, according to the Mayor’s Office of Food Access.

“These are people who have some kind of health condition that makes it more challenging for them to get to a food pantry,” they said. “Then once the pandemic hit and food pantries were closed, it became even more challenging.”

Food for Free is a Cambridge nonprofit that rescues food destined

LAURYN ALLEN/ DFP FILE

Building Audacity is one of multiple Boston nonprofits assisting families facing food insecurity more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic.

to become waste and distributes it to food programs and individuals.

To combat the closure of food banks and protect immunocompromised populations, Food For Free adjusted its food distribution to a boxed program.

“This is the preferred way of distributing food during the pandemic,” Trombley said, “because it limits the number of people actually touching the food and actually makes the handoff to the participants super simple.”

For some nonprofits, including Building Audacity and Food For Free, monetary donations can be useful for buying fresh groceries and grocery store gift cards for the people they serve, Trombley said.

But Navarro said tackling hunger takes more than just donations.

“We need to grow more in the city of Boston,” Navarro said. “I can’t even explain to you how powerful it would be if we started doing more hydroponics, more aquaponics … We have to start self-sustaining.”

Navarro said she’s witnessed an outpouring of support from volunteers, most of whom are ages 18-22.

However, there is still an extreme need for food — Trombley said Food For Free distributed 4.7 million pounds of food in 2020, compared to 2.2 million pounds of food in 2019.

“It’s been really hard on all the organizations involved because it’s been a continually changing problem,” she said. “We wish that we could be distributing even more food because we know there’s a need out there.”

FEATURES 3

BUSINESS

BU officials talk differences in summer housing, remote jobs for third LfA session Ashley Soebroto Daily Free Press Staff

As the end of the Spring semester approaches, Boston University is preparing for its summer terms in the Learn from Anywhere format — the third and likely final LfA implementation.

Although COVID-19 vaccine distribution is well underway in Massachusetts, with Phase Three for individuals who are 16 and older in Massachusetts to begin April 19, the University has moved some of its in-person programs and internships that typically come with on-campus housing to a remote format.

BU spokesperson Colin Riley said the University will continue to provide housing for students participating in summer courses, though not for other programs.

“We typically have a very active use of housing during the summer for events and conferences,” Riley said. “Other programs, high school programs, camps, educational opportunities, those are not being held.”

However, he said housing will be available for BU summer session

students, the Class of 2024 College of General Studies’ Boston-New England Program and those involved in the Center for English Language and Orientation Programs.

Traditionally, on-campus summer jobs such as orientation and other event-planning programs provide summer housing for students.

However, similar to the previous year, many summer jobs did not grant on-campus housing this year because those positions became virtual, said Kevin Lynch, assistant manager at BU’s Student Employment Office.

“I think each one of those departments [offered remote positions] just because of the pandemic and how most things have gone online,” Lynch said.

“I don’t think they are offering housing this year or for this summer, unfortunately.”

Shiney James, director of orientation at BU, said summer orientation positions such as program coordinators, who usually require in-person training over the summer, would not include housing this year.

“Our training this coming summer will be remote too,” James said, “because we need to help our staff to have a presence online to engage with students and start up a conversation.”

James added that orientation programs would be moved online to

avoid creating crowded environments on campus that could risk the health of BU staff and students.

“Before the pandemic, we hosted orientations in person and we would have 600 to 800 students come,” James said. “Since the pandemic, which started last year, we’ve been doing a live remote orientation because there’s so many folks in stay-in-place orders, and we wanted to make sure folks are safe, as well as abide to state and local guidelines about gatherings in person.”

While the number of in-person jobs have declined, Lynch said job opportunities overall have stayed the same due to an increase in remote positions.

“Jobs that didn’t happen over the academic year were really made up for by [virtual] jobs,” Lynch said. “The classroom moderator position, for instance, which was a new position that was created from the pandemic, and then all of the positions that were created at all of the testing facilities as well.”

While there has been a potential decline of in-person, on-campus jobs offered by the University, Lynch said it is still too early to determine whether the number of jobs providing free housing for the upcoming summer have decreased.

To accommodate COVID-19

LIBBY MCCLELLAND/ DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF

33 Harry Agganis Way. Free summer housing for some on-campus jobs and internships was suspended after those positions were moved to a remote format.

guidelines, Riley said students staying over the summer will need to continue taking COVID-19 tests and filling out the daily symptom surveys.

The University will also provide quarantine and isolation housing for on-campus students when required.

“We put in place, with the best guidance, all these public health

measures and protocols, and it’s worked by and large, it’s enabled us to continue through the Fall and into the Spring,” Riley said. “It’s been a very challenging year for everybody, and I think we’re all hopeful that it will be over or in the rearview mirror soon.”

Innovate@BU hosts 21st New Venture Competition for social impacts Divya Sood Daily Free Press Staff

Innovate@BU will host the third and final round its largest annual New Venture Competition Friday.

The competition will feature 12 finalists representing nine different schools and colleges within Boston University.

These ventures are founded by BU undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students as well as recent alums — all united by a shared entrepreneurial spirit and vision for the future.

The $64,000 worth of prizes will be awarded based on the finalists’ solutions to address critical,

unaddressed problems and showcase their project’s potential to grow and maximize impacts, said Li Liang, the managing director of the BUild Lab Student Innovation Center.

“These ventures that are developing meaningful solutions to address large important unmet needs,” she said, “and demonstrating the highest potential to turn the ideas into scalable ventures.”

Liang said the judges consider factors such as the viability of the business model, the testing of the problem and solution, the profundity of their thinking and their team dynamic.

The work is particularly admirable, she said, because students are dedicated to pushing forward their ideas at the BUild Lab despite the

SOPHIE PARK/ DFP FILE

Boston University’s BUild Lab. Innovate@BU will host the third round of its New Venture Competition Friday, awarding prizes to finalists who develop innovative solutions to critical social issues.

difficult year.

“I am inspired by the hard work and the good work that all the student teams have engaged in,” Liang said.

“They’re committing to making change, and they’re doing the hard work to create change.”

The NVC has two tracks: the General Track teams include CoStudy and Phonetic Beats and the Social Impact Track include RefEd, SpecGraphixEDU and Viinko.

Students and recent alumni compete in teams on the venture of their choice, working on their projects with Innovate@BU resources and support.

Victoria Kinnealey, a master’s student in the Questrom School of Business, developed Viinko — a digital time management and planning platform and app — after seeing her younger brother struggle to manage the emotional toll of his high school coursework.

With Viinko, educators can regularly monitor and check in with their students to prevent them from falling behind and assess what skills students need to further develop.

“With Viinko, you have this planner that already is giving you insights and support and guidance and advice,” she said in an interview, “but then all of that is feeding into your special education teacher as well.”

The app is designed to assist students both in and out of school.

Kinnealey said she hopes to integrate this tool in the middle and high

school curricula — where she said these skills need to start being developed — starting with special education classrooms.

“It’s not something that a parent buys, and if you have a parent that may not have the means to purchase this or may not be aware of it, then you’re missing the opportunity,” she said. “We really want it to be like every kid has access to this education.”

Kinnealey said developing time management skills early on can establish a strong foundation for future success.

“The ideal situation is that kids start using Viinko in sixth grade,” she said. “They have support developing these skills from the onset and then they may continue to rely on the Viinko planner through high school, but the hope is that they’re learning these skills in sixth grade so that they’re not falling behind.”

Kimberly Bress, a master’s student in the BU School of Theology, taps into her eight years of living in a Buddhist monastery to provide access to meditation resources through directing Turn In. Reach Out.: a grassroots organization providing social and emotional health support for Black, Indigenuous and people of color communities and promoting racial justice.

She said this work is an extension of her own commitment to “equity and belonging in American Buddhist practice spaces,” which she said are largely white-dominated.

“During my time at the monastery,

I struggled a lot with issues of equity and belonging based on my experience as an individual with disability and as a woman,” Bress said. “I had a first-hand experience of marginalization and I realized that … people of color experienced unique challenges.”

Turn In. Reach Out. seeks to share tools such as meditation with marginalized communities by “empowering organizations that are already trusted in those communities” with social and emotional learning education.

While she said came to this work as a faith leader, not as an aspiring entrepreneur, Bress credits her convictions, values and passion for her success.

The NVC’s finale will be held Friday via Zoom. Audience members will be able to hear each of the finalists’ pitches and cast votes to select the audience favorite.

Liang said she is proud of all entrepreneurs in the competition, not just finalists, and she wants any aspiring entrepreneurs to know they can have a home at the BUild Lab. “At the BUild Lab, we believe in really having students from all backgrounds, all disciplines, all schools, all majors to come participate,” Liang said, “because we really believe that every single one of us has our unique creativity and talents, and we want to just help anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur and create change.”

4 FEATURES

SCIENCE

BU event showcases SoundSpaces: a system adding audio-visual navigation to artificial intelligence Yiran Yu

Associate Features Editor

Artificial intelligence systems have become an almost essential aspect of the modern world. From semi-selfdriving cars to education tools and workplace assistance, demand for efficient AI systems will only increase as more programs are developed.

A new AI simulator called SoundSpaces was introduced Monday at a Zoom webinar, hosted by Boston University’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering. The event showcased the program’s ability to have an independent “agent” guide itself to noise-producing objects through 3D environments.

The system works by placing the model in a 3D simulation of any environment, such as a house. By using audio-visual cues, the agent can navigate its way through 3D environments. The agent will hear a noise and move toward the sound’s source, using visuals and echolocation to find the source of the noise.

“We’re exploring how to achieve spatial understanding from audiovisual observations,” Speaker Kristen

Grauman noted at the event. “What’s really unique here is thinking about it as something that could be a learnable path.”

Grauman is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin and is currently researching computer vision and machine learning for Facebook AI Research — FAIR — along with the SoundSpaces work. She said the research is designed to help the agent move toward audio stimuli.

“The challenge is,” Grauman said at the event, “you want an agent that can be dropped even into a new environment that isn’t yet mapped out, and still be intelligent about moving as a function of what it sees in its camera.”

Developed in part by UT Austin, SoundSpaces is the “first-of-its-kind” to incorporate audio perception in addition to visual perception into an AI agent’s detection process.

Though the AI is being studied in simulations now, Changan Chen, a graduate student at UT Austin and a visiting researcher for FAIR, said the program has the potential to one day help visually or hearing-impaired individuals better detect their surroundings and assist in the case of an emergency.

“Currently, it’s aimed for AI-

assistant robot at home,” he said in an interview, “and secondly, it’s for people to better understand the speech, connecting the space with the hearing.”

Grauman said at Monday’s event the change to a more audio-centric model is much needed.

“There is a key thing missing that we’d like to address head on, and that’s what this talk is about,” she said. “These agents have been living in silent environments, and they are deaf.”

Event host Kate Saenko, an associate professor of computer science at BU, said in an interview this type of dynamic research is one step closer to mirroring human intelligence — a key facet of AI’s overall goal.

“They’re using not only the vision modality and not only the depth perception on the agent, but also the visual depth perception,” Saenko said.

“This is an active exploration of the agent’s environment.”

Saenko also said SoundSpaces is goal-oriented, processing and interpreting noise for the “purpose of navigation.”

“It’s the first-of-its-kind acoustic simulation platform for audio-visual embodied AI research,” Saenko said.

“Basically, think of it as a Roomba but

COURTESY OF MIKE MACKENZIE VIA FLICKR

In a Monday webinar, Boston University’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering introduced SoundSpaces, a new program that adds audio-visual navigation to artificial intelligence.

more advanced.”

At the event, questions were posed about what happens when a space becomes audibly complicated, with other noises such as dogs barking or car alarms wailing that could distract the agent from the sound they’re supposed to follow.

And this is where this system gets interesting, Chen said: developing methods to create more complex navigation tasks to help train the agent’s cognitive learning skills.

“What we are proposing is to make the robot have multi-sensory experience in the simulation,” he said.

These audio aspects of the simulation contribute to creating a multi-dimensional world through sound and space that help better perform increasingly difficult tasks while navigating an unknown virtual

environment, Grauman said at the event.

“We’re going to have an agent train itself through experience to come up with a policy that tells it how it wants to move, based on what it’s currently seeing, or has seen in the past,” Grauman said, “as well as what it’s currently hearing or has heard in the past.”

Nonetheless, it also has great future potential to make an impact, Chen said.

“Eventually, we want to move on into the real world and enable the rules in the real world to do whatever [the agent] can do in the simulation,” he said. “Maybe a fire alarm going off, and then the robot can basically find it and let you know something’s wrong with both the visual and hearing ability. That will be really cool.”

ARTS

Netflix docuseries brings Isabella Stewart Gardner art theft to life Lily Kepner Features Editor

he biggest news on March 18, 1990 should have been the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Instead, the largest art heist in history silently took place in Fenway’s Venetian oasis, claiming 13 missing works worth more than $500 million total.

Thirty-one years later and the missing art — including prestigious Rembrandts and a rare Vermeer — have yet to be found and returned.

But the chase is long from over.

“This is a Robbery: The World’s Greatest Art Heist” — a four-part docuseries — premiered Wednesday on Netflix. As of Monday, it was the second most popular program in the United States on the platform.

Boston-area local Colin Barnicle, the director of the series, said in an interview he pursued the unsolved case because of its local lore and his desire to intimately dissect the “ticking clock” of the theft.

“It’s one of the great mysteries of our hometown,” he said. “When you start to research it, it’s just so hard not to get sucked in to the mystery.”

Isabella Stewart Gardner, an art collector in the late 1800s and early 1900s, oversaw construction and curated the museum from her personal collection in the thenundeveloped Back Bay Fens, a palace wholly unique to her style. In her will, she wrote nothing in the museum could be altered, changed or sold.

On that mid-March day 31 years ago, two men posing as police officers were buzzed into the museum against protocol, and handcuffed and tied up security. In 81 minutes, they stole 13

works of art — including Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and Vermeer’s “The Concert” — pulling off history’s largest art heist and property theft to date.

No arrests have been made.

In following Gardner’s will, the frames of the stolen works still hang on the walls, a grim reminder of the theft no one can seem to solve.

Barnicle said wrestling with the unknown contributed to the difficulty of pursuing this production — but so did the thrill of the chase.

“You’re running headlong into the last act, and it’s unsolved,” he said.

“How do you create, or how do you make sure that the viewer has some sort of catharsis with that?”

Barnicle — who owns the Emmy Award-winning production company Barnicle Brothers with his brother, Nick — said the best part of bringing the history to life was working out the theories: going to courthouses to comb through files, collecting information from families and investigating each theory.

“It was fun to investigate and argue with my brother about the different theories,” he said. “We had to go through every single other theory, and that was a really fun part to do researching and kind of being a detective.”

It was also what made it frustrating, he said.

The process of creating the docuseries started in 2014, Barnacle said. In the end, only a fraction of the discovery is illustrated in the film.

The crew shot at night in the “spooky” halls of the unlit museum, mirroring the late-night theft in a unique way, Barnicle said.

“Nobody’s filmed at night there for 25 years or something like that,” he said. “It really gives a different sense of what the robbers were seeing and experiencing in there.”

The finished product layers evocations — reenactments of witness events based in reality — with real footage, photos, maps and B-roll of the museum and city. Every part of the series was grounded in fact, he said, down to the camera angle of the reenactments and the frames per second.

“We try not to show anything twice,” he said. “In the evocations, throughout the four-part series, they slightly change from episode to episode to try to show that, you know, people are misremembering, or they’re forgetting.”

The final product both encapsulates the heart-pounding chase of suspects, tips and leads and contemplative moments of rest when the film focuses on the artwork itself animated into the empty frames it left behind — places where Barnicle made the art a “character” in the film itself.

“We felt it was important to kind of break up the fast pace because you’re hurtling headlong and it’s detailoriented,” he said, “and the best way to hit the pause button was to try to ground ourselves inside the museum with the art that was lost.”

Jay O’Callahan, a storyteller who spent January of 1999 as an artistin-residence at the museum, grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. Going to the museum with his mother as a teenager, he said he was able to see the paintings long before the theft and became very familiar with their beauty.

He recalled one night during his residency, nearly a decade after the works were stolen, when he traversed the museum with a guard at night, flashlight in hand.

“We go to the Dutch Room, which is my favorite room, and shine the light on the paintings,” he said.

“Instead of [Christ in] the Storm [on] the Sea of Galilee, there’s a blank

space and then the Vermeer, a blank space, and it just seemed, it seemed sad.”

As an artist-in-resident, with permission, he was able to walk around the grounds at night, and said he’d imagine where the thieves would have hidden the work or what they thought of the theft they were committing.

In a writers group, O’Callahan said he wrote his own fictitious novel about a Gardner robbery, though he never published it. He said the sadness over the loss still grows. “[Gardner] has this imagination that she must have had as a child and she’s able to create it [the museum],” he said. “It’s not destroyed, but it is defiled.”

Laura Anderson Barbata, a transdisciplinary artist who was an artist in-residence of the museum in 2016, said being surrounded by Gardner’s art helped her “physically, spiritually, emotionally.”

They said the heist, in claiming the 13 works, robbed a part of “humanity.”

“In such a violent way, to cut out a painting, to us it’s like you’ve cut into my body,” Barbata said. “To be there and to see the frames, you have many different emotions that come to you.”

Barbata said the frames, to her, represent both a memorial and a “space of light.”

“It feels like the empty frames are also about ‘you’re coming back, we are here waiting for you, you have not been forgotten,” they said. “It’s this place of optimism and of faith in the future.”

Gregory Maguire — author of The New York Times Best Seller 1995 “Wicked” — was an artistin-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum a year before his claim to fame, doing the book’s final revisions and thinking about his next work, “Confessions of an Ugly

Stepsister.”

Maguire, who lived in the old carriage house for his residency, wrote in an email his time was characterized both by the “daunting magnificence” of the company and the absence of the empty frames.

The frames, however, were also a reminder to him to fill the void.

“I felt the pain of the loss, which lingers still; it’s like having beloved family members lost at sea. Are they going to turn up on some desert island? Alive? Well? One can only hope,” he wrote. “In their absence, one remembers all the harder, to keep them alive.”

Maguire wrote the theft is both a global tragedy and a “local sorrow” — felt deeply by those close. However, he wrote “there’s still time” to solve it and bring the beloved art home.

A museum spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement that “the Museum’s commitment to resolving the crime has never diminished since its occurrence 31 years ago,” and that they are optimistic about its return.

The museum invites information through email and promises confidentiality. A $10 million reward will be given to anyone with direct information for the safe retrieval of the art.

For Barnicle, he said he thinks the works will return, at least the lesser-known ones. In the meantime, however, he invites college students and any viewers to become “armchair detectives” and take on the mystery themselves.

“My real hope is it’s one of those huge Reddit boards that happens where there’s all these ideas and information passing around,” he said. “We really want to … saturate the audience so they could have the tools to be able to figure it out for themselves. That’s the goal.”

OPINION 5

EDITORIAL

Boston Police’s overtime budget is out of control, in desperate need of fewer officers, reallocation Under acting Mayor Kim Janey’s administration, Boston’s new budget once again plans to slash the city police department’s overtime.

Former Mayor Marty Walsh reduced the overtime budget from $60 million to $48 million — with the $12 million reallocated to social services — in 2020. This time, Janey will be dropping the budget by another $4 million.

However, Walsh’s attempt didn’t work: The police department is projected to spend $65 million — almost $20 million over budget — on overtime by the end of this fiscal year. In fact, the very protests against the police and systemic racism last summer have directly led to almost $5.8 million in overtime profits for Boston police.

Who’s to say Janey’s plan will go any better?

The problem is in the police union contract and the laws surrounding policing. Legally, the department is protected from any consequences of running over on their budget. The recently expired contract also rounds up any overtime shift longer than half an hour to a full hour of pay, which can accumulate to be equal to or more than their base salary.

There is not enough supervision and oversight into the use of overtime, which has led to overtime fraud and false slips in the past — as recent as last month.

Any further accountability has to come from a third party as well, not internally, because

blatant problems arise when the police are able to protect their own. For instance, despite knowing of former officer Patrick Rose’s sexual assault on a child, the Boston Police DepartmentBPD kept it under wraps, allowing him to stay on the force for 21 years, rise to power, continue molesting a supposed five other children and even work on sexual assault cases involving children.

However, it isn’t even about accountability or training at this point. Implementing thirdparty oversight probably wouldn’t be feasible or realistic for such an extensive system and for a government that has proven an “all bark, no bite” pattern of response to the issue of policing.

We aren’t hopeful the proposed infrastructure will even improve the policing system — the police commissioner has executive power over final decisions and punishments made by the new Office of Police Accountability and Transparency.

Furthermore, the planned budget doesn’t appear to redistribute the $16 million in cut overtime funds to anti-racist programs and social services, like Walsh’s 2020-2021 fiscal proposal. Instead, Janey will be funding 30 more officer positions, plus the return of injured officers.

Why would we work to hire more officers and push them back into the force faster? Black, Indigenous and other minority communities are already disproportionality policed, and the effects of this have proven to be deadly.

Less policing doesn’t mean more officer positions or more training, which has been proven ineffective. Rather, it means reducing the funding, responsibilities and number of positions.

It means that we can’t have Boston’s budget cut “deep” into the vast pockets of police overtime without addressing the system that allows them to face basically zero penalization for their behavior. We need a way to permanently cap the overtime budget — with no wiggle room.

If the department goes over, that money should be taken out of their funding, or better yet, their weapons budget, since they evidently can’t tell the difference between tasers and guns.

The recent killing of Daunte Wright in Minnesota, miles from where George Floyd was killed almost a year ago, proves we have learned nothing. Our police remain the same, hold the same power and are allowed to continue repeating the same dangerous, traumatic, violent loop.

We need a swift and far-reaching cultural shift to deprioritize the policing system, which cannot happen until local governments express they are serious about defunding or reform.

As of now, this is not the case, despite empty, half-hearted attempts to appease us. It’s apparent in their overtime rights — the nearly $40,000 salary difference between urban police who typically spend only about 4% of their time responding to serious violent crime and

public school teachers who are actively working to educate the youth — and our involuntary reliance on a system we can’t trust.

Let’s be honest: 911 is the go-to emergency dial number, even for non-emergencies. Every issue is directed to the police — whether it’s a minor injury, a trip to the hospital, a fire, a mental health crisis, domestic abuse or sexual abuse — before being either redirected to the correct authorities or dealt with by officers who can mishandle and escalate the situation.

We need to not only dismantle the BPD through effective, lasting budget cuts, but also promote and uplift alternative resources and social services that don’t require submitting vulnerable people and especially BIPOC and other minorities to the police.

The lack of follow-through on the overtime cuts and the expansion of the police force is especially frustrating given that such policy changes are coming from Janey, the city’s first Black mayor, who has built her platform on confronting racial inequities.

We now look toward the other mayoral candidates for their responses to policing, and a commitment to their word, as the race unfolds.

It’s time we stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars paying the criminals, abusers, child molestors, killers and bystanders who “protect” us.

ILLUSTRATION BY SEEMA THAKKAR

EDITORIAL BOARD Colbi Edmonds, Editor-in-Chief Nick Kolev, Campus Editor Charles Moore, Sports Editor Hannah Yoshinaga, Photo Editor

Cameron Morsberger, Managing Editor Daniel Kool, City Editor

Jackson Machesky, Podcast Editor

Alexia Nizhny, Layout & Graphics Editor Emma Sanchez, Lifestyle Editor

Abbigale Shi, Opinion Editor

Lily Kepner, Features Editor

GRAPHIC BY ALEXIA NIZHNY Andrew Harwood, Multimedia Editor

OPINION 6

COLUMNS Minority Report:

Lincoln Currie Columnist

It was April 9 when Robert Brown asked — nay, demanded — I take a shot. Being the good Scottish-Korean that I am, I said yes. And what kind of college student says no to a free shot?

The shot, of course, is a COVID-19 vaccine, which BU will require students to receive before the Fall 2021 semester. We will be free at last.

I believe in civil liberties and a person’s right to decide what goes in their body. But when your refusal to put something in your body means I have to be under quasi-house arrest and indefinitely stare into the blank void of Zoom, then you have infringed on my rights. I don’t tolerate that. I’m glad Brown put his foot down.

Many states require vaccination for diseases like meningitis for kids to enroll in public school. This requirement has been effective in creating herd immunity, which is when a disease dies out because a large enough portion of the population is immune to it, and the virus is

A OP HI BY S N

For now, I am cheering for an authoritarian measure carried out by the BU administration.

Shots make me do crazy things.

AT IO

transmission and drastically reduce the chance of hospitalization and death from COVID-19.

BU is doing both the right and smart thing by mandating the COVID-19 vaccine.

But I wonder how much of the University’s self-interest is wrapped up in this, too. BU’s enrollment deposit due date, aka Decision Day, is May 1.

I feel the University wants accepted students to know BU is a good choice for the Fall because vaccine mandates might have the effect of making incoming freshmen’s college experience a normal one — one far different from the current gray hellscape.

But who cares? If this was a cold-blooded, profit-motivated decision, it makes no difference to me.

At the end of the day, the odds of me having a real college experience again and going to class like a normal person are much better because of this policy.

I want my life back, and so does everybody else. Counting on my fellow students’ goodwill to wear face masks and follow social distancing guidelines does not cut it for me. Mandatory vaccinations are the only option at this point, but I still credit BU for a sensible mandate.

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Vaccine mandates have already been challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the state’s interest in protecting public health trumps an individual’s right to not vaccinate their child on religious grounds.

The state has an interest in keeping its people safe, and vaccine mandates are one of the least problematic ways to do that.

The anti-vaccination movement seems born from satire, but sadly it is not. Previously eradicated diseases have resurfaced thanks to people rejecting basic vaccinations.

The 1989-1991 measles outbreak was both preventable and expensive, costing $100 million in direct medical expenses. And even after measles was eliminated from the country by the year 2000, the disease saw a spike in 2014 and about another in 2019.

If vaccination campaigns in the 1980s would have been more effective, perhaps through stronger vaccine mandates, then the costly, recurring crisis may have been averted.

Mandatory vaccination does so many good things — how many other solutions make the public safer while decreasing cost? Vaccines really are a silver bullet.

If we get to herd immunity at BU and in the United States, and COVID-19 is eradicated, we can have our lives back. Still, some have their reasons — albeit bad ones — not to get vaccinated.

Some might have unsubstantiated doubts about the COVID-19 vaccines and their efficacy or side effects. Others might be too lazy to sign up for an appointment.

Fortunately, the campus requirement marries those two star-crossed lovers: self-interest and doing the right thing. We know the approved vaccines in the country effectively reduce

FL ISS LE R

Shot for Shot

LIFESTYLE:

You should really make monthly playlists Grace Donahue Daily Free Press Staff

My Spotify Premium subscription unlocked a new personal hobby the past two years: making playlists.

The time I spend listening to music has spiked this year. With everything I do — walking to class, switching laundry, picking up mail,

working out, writing — I like to have a bit of background music in my ear. The music feels like my second heartbeat, a constant in my life.

It helps that I blindly believe I have excellent taste in music.

Since around June of last year, I began compiling my current favorite songs into monthly playlists. It helps me find new songs and artists as well as remember certain feelings and memories from specific points in my life. Now, I get a little bit too much joy when I realize the month is ending because I get to carefully curate next

month’s soundtrack.

The monthly playlists I curate are usually very long, about 50 to 60 songs each. I can’t listen to the same 10 songs for weeks on end — although, I have those immediate favorites that I stream as much as I can for about two days.

One emerging pattern is that a few songs from the end of the previous month’s playlist will become the starting point for the next month’s playlist. This is especially true when I don’t get to listen to certain songs as much as I would like to, or the shuffle algorithm has not

ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH YOSHINAGA | DAILY FREE PRESS

Making monthly playlists allows you to discover new artists and remember past favorites while fitting your music to your current mood.

been in their favor. There is no room for “filler” songs in my playlists, either — I am not afraid to delete songs that just do not match the vibe.

Going through my older playlists, I can see myself walking my dog in the middle of August listening to Chloe x Halle’s album “Ungodly Hour” and Rina Sawayama’s “SAWAYAMA” on repeat. These songs provide an intimate look into my past. Any one of these playlists contains songs I cried to, ran to, screamed in my car to.

Anytime I felt a certain type of way, my feelings can be represented by these songs.

I have a strong belief that monthly playlists are the best way to organize songs, but I’ve heard many alternatives. One of the craziest in my opinion is creating one long list of every song you ever liked. That sounds insane to me because I like keeping all my months of music separate to keep track of the memories. I could never just have a running list of every song I ever listened to and hit shuffle.

Each playlist has a general mood that I like to set. Everything revolves around my life and where I am at in terms of school, emotions, relationships — or lack thereof — and the weather. Currently, my April playlist is reminiscent of end-of-the-semester burnout, but it also has dreamy pop hits that sound great when I’m walking up Commonwealth Avenue with the sun shining on my face.

I am quite proud of my playlists and how I have curated my listening. It is something so small and seemingly inane, but music brings me so much joy.

I do not know how common it is to make monthly playlists. Is it a unique and fun idea? Is it something everyone does and has just eluded my knowledge? If you are not already making playlists every month, I highly recommend it.

You never know when you will want to relive the memories of your summer self through the songs that followed you everywhere for those 30 or so days.