Department News

Research at the University at Buffalo’s National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR) is leveraging ontology to assist in the efforts to control the current outbreak, accelerate data discovery in future pandemics, and promote reproducible infectious disease research. Read the news story by Bert Gambini. Also see the related paper, The Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), a community-based ontology for coronavirus disease knowledge and data integration, sharing, and analysis, here.

Although much has been written about Cuba after Castro, relatively little has been written about Cuba before Castro. The political reality of Castro’s Revolution has created a historical void about this period, paying insufficient attention to an important century before 1959. Cuba has become a political punching bag, between supporters and critics of Castro and the Revolution, making it difficult to understand real life in Cuba because of the disproportionate preoccupation with, and monopoly of, the political reality on the island. In spite of some attempts, it continues to be easier and perceived as more pressing, to write about politics rather than the reality that Cubans experienced in their daily lives— their sufferings and celebrations, successes and failures, lives and deaths, and beliefs and disbeliefs. Going for and against the avalanche of information about the political authenticity in and out of Cuba, most Cubans have tended to forget that Cuba is much larger than the perceived reality after Castro’s Revolution. Too many have failed to remember the Cubans who have lived and worked in Cuba in the century before an important period of Cuban history where the nation was forged. Indeed, even limited attention reveals a rich and sophisticated society that calls for study. 

Oxford University Press (OUP) has announced that Dr. Ryan Muldoon is co-editor of its new book series, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Dr. Muldoon, Associate Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program, University at Buffalo Department of Philosophy, is an expert in social political philosophy. As one of five co-editors of the book series, Muldoon enjoys the support and advice of OUP's Editorial Advisory Board. 

Philosophy, Politics and Economics begins with a wide-angle view of the inherent tools found in these three disciplines. It considers their strengths and blind spots, and then pulls the various instruments together to create a robust mechanism that can creatively inform, explain and evaluate those systems and forces influencing organizations and societies. UB’s three-dimensional PPE design also includes an early course in model-based reasoning, which has been developed specifically for the program. “The idea is to help students think about the world using models that allow them to consider complicated problems, Ryan Muldoon, associate professor, Department of Philosophy.

On the occasion of commemorating service to a Department and a University which ran for almost fifty years, that had its start at a time of the anti-war movement and the student protests of the late 1960s, and ended at the time of digital globalization and economic precarity of the late 2010s, it is worth remembering Professor Kah Kyung Cho’s turbulent beginings. It may well be said that his early life was determined by such a series of rare events, and strokes of good fortune, which one encounters only in the fictional world of a novel. But, at the same time, Prof. Cho’s life tale was the offspring of a different era, an era that seems today a distant past, when hardship, insecurity, danger, and eventually chance, ruled. Read more.