Horgan Seminar Blog

Faye Gilbert  For those of us in the New York Metropolitan area, flooding is no small feat, nor is it a new one. Think back to one of the most prominent tropical storms in this area’s history: Hurricane Sandy. For those alive during the storm, especially residents of the New York Metropolitan area, the effects were devastating. In the days following the storm, there were forty-three deaths, six-thousand patients rushed out of hospitals and nursing homes, over a million children out of school for a week, and close to two million residents with lost power in New York City alone [1]. No one went unaffected, and given the sheer monstrosity and unique nature of the storm, it’s no surprise why.  Not long after Sandy first touched eastern United States ground on October 29, 2012, 51 square miles of New York City— 17% of its landmass— was flooded.  In coastal areas like the Coney Island and Tottenville Peninsulas, flooding was as high as 11 to 14 feet [1]. In the case of the...

     Have you ever experienced a loss of innocence, the feeling of growing to understand the world around you and the resulting change in your mentality that comes along with it? It is a common experience, especially for those reaching adolescence. This loss of innocence is rooted in the inherent ignorance we possess as children. Children simply don't understand the complex reality of the world, and the evil it can possess. This ignorance is shed as they encounter harsh realities, personal betrayal, moral complexity, and a loss of idealized beliefs. By the time I became a college student, I thoroughly believed I had fully experienced my own loss of innocence. However, I once again encountered that old familiar feeling during my senior year of college in the most unexpected place.      I was first approached by my friend Aaron during my junior year, who asked if I wanted to do a research project with him during our senior year. The project in question relate...

Jack Caputo 2 May 2026 HST401 I pledge my Honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System I Know What You're Thinking... Regular folks have been harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), mostly in the form of large-language models (LLMs), since it took over the world a few years ago. People are being fired and replaced with AI, students are outsourcing all their work to it, and AI slop has flowed into every crevice of the Internet. People have formed an idea of what AI can do, or perhaps all it can do. Of course, machine learning algorithms were implemented years before the all-powerful LLMs that have come to dominate the market and cultural consciousness. Smaller machine learning models were created to be able to pick out patterns in data more reliably than humans or traditional data analysis methods, or perhaps patterns they couldn’t see at all. The field has matured at astounding rates – but what’s next? Well, what if I told you that this same underlying technol...

  Connor Hsuan Professor Horgan HST 401 25 April 2026 I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System. The Job Market Looks Great for Robots For New Grads, Not So Much The biggest problem on any student's mind currently in college is what their future employment will look like. Many new grads have struggled to find a job out of college and being even one year out of college without any employment is almost a death sentence for your career. These difficulties are only increased even further with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence and the diversion of company resources from the creation of new jobs. In 2025, only 181,000 jobs were added to the United States labor market, which is a massive decrease from the 1.46 million jobs added in 2024. This makes 2025 the worst year for jobs since 2020, which was famously the year that the pandemic started. While hiring has increased recently, with 130,000 jobs created in January, unemployment still sits at 4.3%, which...

  Mary Casey HST 401 Professor Horgan 30 April 2026 Wait…Have I Been Here Before? The Neuroscience Behind Déja Vù Introduction It’s Wednesday, and you’re sitting in your 11 am class zoning in and out of the professor’s lecture. Suddenly, you feel that something is…off. The professor says something in a certain tone, someone laughs a certain way, and someone else sneezes, all in that order. For a moment you freeze. Wait. I’ve been in this exact moment before . It’s hard to explain when or where, but it feels completely real. You feel you know what happens next. The next thing you know, the feeling is gone. Such an experience is known as déja vù, French for “already seen.” It is something that most people, around 60-80%, experience at least once in their lifetime (Labate et al., 2018). Although it lasts only a few seconds, it raises the interesting question: why does my brain sometimes feel like it remembers something, something that never even happened in the first place?  Rese...