Author: Ms. R.

Members of the MIT community from around the world gathered virtually on Sunday, April 26 to celebrate the 19th annual IDEAS Awards presented by the PKG Center for Public Service. IDEAS is MIT’s social innovation challenge and has been bringing MIT students together with mentors from industry, academia, and community organizations for nearly 20 years to tackle pressing social and environmental issues through innovation.  Due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the IDEAS Showcase (which typically takes place in-person at……

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MIT professor of linguistics Wayne O’Neil died on March 22 at his home in Somerville, Massachusetts. The cause of death was cancer. He was 88 years old. O’Neil’s work focused on syntactic and phonological theory, on the role of linguistics in the school curriculum, and on second-language acquisition, both the theory and the relevance of the latter to bilingual education and to the revitalization of indigenous languages. An MIT faculty member for more than 50 years, O’Neil served as……

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When the MIT campus is alive, it nearly sings with innovation and excitement. Students sustain one another with activities ranging from building in makerspaces to psetting in residence halls to pick-up soccer games on the fields. But how can they remain connected during a pandemic, where physical distancing is the new normal? What can replace the informal chats with faculty members after class? Throw in remote learning — and the Infinite Corridor seems infinitely far away. Enter the MIT……

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As more artificial intelligence applications move to smartphones, deep learning models are getting smaller to allow apps to run faster and save battery power. Now, MIT researchers have a new and better way to compress models.  It’s so simple that they unveiled it in a tweet last month: Train the model, prune its weakest connections, retrain the model at its fast, early training rate, and repeat, until the model is as tiny as you want.  “That’s it,” says Alex Renda, a PhD……

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To address the increased need for digital content and distance learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, the MIT Press is rapidly expanding access to a variety of free content. From making select books freely available on their open-source platform to granting libraries complimentary access to its institutional e-book platform, the press will continue to bring content to readers in a variety of formats. “The full staff is now working remotely and will continue to do so for as long as……

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MIT students Katie Collins, Vaishnavi Phadnis, and Vaibhavi Shah have  been selected to receive a Barry Goldwater Scholarship for the 2020-21 academic year. Over 5,000 college students from across the United States were nominated for the scholarships, from which only 396 recipients were selected based on academic merit.  The Goldwater scholarships have been conferred since 1989 by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. These scholarships have supported undergraduates who go on to become leading scientists, engineers,……

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