Boston University Welcomes Ian Westmacott as SAIL Director
The Hariri Institute for Computing is pleased to welcome Dr. Ian Westmacott as Director of the Boston University Software and Application Innovation Lab (SAIL), effective August 3, 2026. He will lead the Institute’s professional software development team, working with faculty and students to develop software, systems, and AI infrastructure tailored to their research needs. Westmacott […]
From Pilot to Platform: BU’s SAIL Wins Sloan Grant to Scale AI Access Initiative
Open-source framework to make generative AI more reproducible, secure, and accessible across higher education By Maureen L. Stanton Boston University’s Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) at the Hariri Institute has been awarded a $400,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to expand an initiative aimed at addressing a growing challenge in higher education: […]
The Boston Women’s Workforce Council Finds a 30% Decline in the Boston Gender Wage Gap
By Chloe Wojtanik, Hariri Institute for Computing Alongside Boston University’s Hariri Institute, the Boston Women’s Workforce Council (BWWC) unveiled their 2023 Gender and Racial Wage Gap Data Results this month. Excitingly, the BWWC found that the gender wage gap in Greater Boston has declined by 30% – from 30¢ to 21¢. This is the first […]
How Dickens and other Authors Shaped Attitudes to Education—With Lasting Impacts
In Education for All? BU political scientist Cathie Jo Martin says education systems continue to be influenced by the ideas of Enlightenment- and Industrial Revolution-Era writers Story by Maureen Stanton and Alex Grzybowski Video by Natalie Williams In her new book, Education for All, Cathie Jo Martin, a Hariri Institute faculty affiliate and BU professor […]
Hariri Institute Community Recognition Awards
Congratulations to the recipients of the 2023 Hariri Institute Community Recognition Awards! This inaugural program recognizes Hariri Institute personnel whose contributions have been instrumental in helping to bring success to their team and to our organization. This program also aims to raise awareness of the important work that transpires, at all levels, within the Institute and […]
SAIL’s first blockchain project will bring digitized, mechanized agriculture to underdeveloped populations
BY WILL J TOMLINSON, Ph.D. Africa is home to 60% of the world’s arable land, with 900 million hectares suitable for agricultural activities. However, many small holder farmers lack the machinery they need to plow their fields. As a result, most farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa plow their crops by hand. Enter Hello Tractor: a firm […]
SAIL engineers create software that helps researchers understand mechanisms underlying cancer
BY GINA MANTICA Different types of cells in the body such as skin cells and eye cells are made by turning different sets of genes “on” or “off”. With state-of-the-art technologies like single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq), researchers can now study the diversity of genes turned on or off in different cell types to better understand […]
Will J. Tomlinson Takes the Helm of SAIL, Bringing Industry Knowledge to Expand Services
BY GINA MANTICA Will J. Tomlinson will lead faculty members into a new era of research convergence. As Director of the Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL), Tomlinson will elevate SAIL’s software development within and beyond Boston University. He will develop a diverse, resilient culture that researchers leverage to advance their projects and deploy their […]
Developing a Cloud-Based Platform to Standardize Data Storage from Wearable Brain Sensing Devices
BY GINA MANTICA To study how the brain works in the real world rather than the lab, researchers are creating wearable devices that obtain a complete picture of the brain’s activity in real time. But the complex data collected by researchers needs to be stored, organized, and shared in a way that allows for more […]
Software Engineers Team Up with Sociologists for Criminal Justice Reform
BY: GINA MANTICA Social science that uses qualitative research methods is ideal for understanding complex social and political processes that contribute to pressing societal issues. But this type of research is limited by the time-consuming process of manually collecting and analyzing qualitative data. To address this problem, sociologists at Boston University (BU) and the University […]