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Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received $124,936 from the Heising-Simons Foundation for a five-year project to simulate and detect potential biosignatures from exoplanets. The project, led by Assistant Professor of Physics Clara Sousa-Silva, will look for potential markers of life beyond Earth by expanding our understanding of how molecules behave in different atmospheric environments. “Currently, the most pressing limitation in the characterization of planets, and, ultimately, the detection of life, is our lack of understanding of molecules and their environmental interactions,” professor Sousa-Silva explains. “My research proposal aims to address this problem through a combination of quantum chemistry, astrobiology, and planetary sciences.”
 
Professor Sousa-Silva’s previous work focused on simulating spectra (the band of colors produced by the separation of components of light by wavelength) for biosignature gases. Now, with the development of more advanced observational technologies, she is able to apply that work more directly by studying the atmospheric spectrum of exoplanets and identifying molecules connected to life. In 2019, professor Sousa-Silva was named a 51 Pegasi b fellow with the Foundation. The fellowship, which is named for the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star, provides three years of postdoctoral support to early-career scholars in planetary science and astronomy.
 
The Heising-Simons Foundation is a family foundation that funds work that advances sustainable solutions in climate and clean energy, enables groundbreaking research in science, enhances the education of our youngest learners, and supports human rights for all people.

Speaking with Bard professors Francine Prose and Stephen Shore, Susan D’Agostino ’91 probes the legal and creative implications of the use of generative AI programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E for Inside Higher Ed. At the heart of the debate is whether these programs “copy” journalistic and creative works, or whether they could be considered “fair use,” D’Agostino writes. Alongside this concern is whether the output of these programs could be considered art—or human. “The question of ‘what is a human being?’ is resurfacing through this and starting really good discussions,” Prose told D’Agostino. “There’s so much pressure to dehumanize or commodify people, to tell young people that they are their Instagram page.” Some imagine a future where these kinds of programs are used to assist human artmaking, a future which may have already arrived. “Shore recently asked DALL-E—a generative AI image tool—to create a photograph in his style,” D’Agostino writes. Reviewing DALL-E’s output, Shore was “satisfied, if not wowed, by the result.” “I would have made one decision slightly differently, but it was pretty good,” he said.