Founded in 1990, the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King by increasing the presence of, and recognizing the contributions of, underrepresented minority scholars at MIT. MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars enhance their scholarship through intellectual engagement with the MIT community and enrich the cultural, academic, and professional experience of students. Six scholars are visiting MIT this academic year as part of the program. Kasso Okoudjou is returning for a second year as an MLK Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Originally from Benin, he moved to the United States in 1998 and earned a PhD in mathematics from Georgia Tech. Okoudjou joins MIT from the University of Maryland College Park, where he is a professor.

As we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I want to reflect on all the positive things that have stemmed from this great man sharing his visions and dreams to make the world a better place. What if Dr. King had some of the modern marvels that we use daily to communicate, entertain, and share our personal views with our community and the world: Would things have been different? While having lunch with my friend and fellow #techie Rishabh Sharma, CEO of Poletus--which uses state of art machine learning as a central nervous system to its product offering--we began to run the mental algorithmic reasons of what if. The first thing that came to mind is what if Dr. King had access to machine learning. Now, I know that some think that machine learning is something mythical, but it's not.