Top MIT scientist injured in Vietnam
Seymour Papert , a professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worldrenowned pioneer of artificial intelligence, was in a coma in a Hanoi hospital yesterday after a traffic accident in Vietnam, where he was attending a conference.
Papert, 78, an expert on how children learn, was struck by a motorbike Tuesday while crossing one of the many traffic-clogged streets near his hotel in Hanoi. He underwent brain surgery at the French Hospital on Wednesday to remove a blood clot that had formed . As of last night, he was in stable but critical condition, said Alexandra Kahn, spokeswoman for the Media Laboratory at MIT.
Colleagues reached at the hospital in Hanoi last night said doctors had put Papert in a medically induced coma, but that they planned to try to wake him today.
"There's still a very high probability of death," said Uri Wilensky, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University who was crossing the street with Papert when he was hit. "But we're more hopeful each day, because each day he's getting better."
Wilensky said Papert's daughter had recently arrived and his wife was on the way.
Nicholas Negroponte, one of Papert's closest friends and colleagues from MIT, arrived in Hanoi Wednesday and was helping oversee Papert's care.
"I'm very pleased with the hands he's in," Negroponte said by cellphone from the hospital. "I cannot tell you how modern and clean the hospital is."
Negroponte said there are no immediate plans to move Papert to another facility or out of the country.
The accident occurred about 4 p.m. on Tuesday, as Papert and Wilensky were leaving their hotel for a keynote address Wilensky was about to deliver at the conference hosted by the Hanoi University of Technology.
The two had just been talking about building a mathematical model to describe Hanoi's notoriously chaotic streets, where there are few traffic lights or stop signs and a stream of speeding motorbikers.
"We were really amazed and frightened by the traffic," Wilensky said.
As they crossed what Wilensky described as a "very tricky intersection" -- one without traffic lights -- they tried their best to avoid all the motorbikes, which were weaving around them. But then one motorbiker sped toward Papert and hit him in the chest, Wilensky said.
"He spun around and fell to the ground, hitting his head," Wilensky said. "He was immediately unconscious and in a coma."
Papert, who helped develop the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT and was a founding faculty member at the MIT Media Lab in the 1980s, spoke Monday at a conference on teaching mathematics with digital technology. He was among more than 100 international experts from 30 countries who had gathered for the event.
When Papert, who was born and educated in South Africa, started discussing his ideas about children using computers to learn and enhance their creativity some 40 years ago, some laughed, said Walter Bender, president of software and content for the One Laptop Per Child project at MIT, a program, inspired by Papert, to provide low-cost computers to children in the developing world.
Papert's dream of affordable personal computers, at that time, seemed like science fiction. "The idea that you would dedicate time to children on the mainframe was quite outlandish," Bender said.
But Papert, who is deemed among the first to start thinking about childhood development using technology, would not let it go. He believed in what he called "constructionism," Bender said, the theory that one learns through doing.
In Papert's laboratory, children learned how to use computers to write and create graphics. He also created the programming behind the first children's toys with built-in computers, and he launched a new computer language called Logo. Logo-based software was used to promote teaching and learning.
"Seymour had a very different idea about what the computer is for," Bender said. "It wasn't about instruction, it was about expression."
Today Papert is considered the world's foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn. His research is behind many children's learning tools, such as Lego's digital product brand called Mindstorms.
