Author: Ms. R.

Shortly after being awarded tenure in July, Cem Tasan was asked to give a talk about what it took to earn the appointment.    Tasan, the Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), would speak directly to his peers, his students, and others in his department and could take any angle he wished. He could talk about the research he did. The relationships and collaborations he made. The students……

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Learning has always come naturally to Brandon Ogbunu. When he was a child growing up in Manhattan, his mother, a teacher, instilled in him an appreciation for school, the sciences, and curiosity. At work, she taught mathematics, social studies, and special education. At home, she taught her son to embrace art, literature, and sports in addition to science, laying the groundwork for a well-rounded approach to learning that would inform the rest of his career. Ogbunu grew up during……

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A bit of turbulence in the job market can affect people in different ways. Consider the Egyptian scholar Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364-1442). In the early 1400s, after about a quarter-century of frustration in seeking short-lived administrative jobs and wealthy patrons in Cairo, al-Maqrizi became fed up for good. He retreated to his house, started writing, and more or less did not stop for 30 years. What resulted is the most expansive corpus of historical writing of……

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When deep learning models are deployed in the real world, perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images, they are often able to outperform humans. But what exactly are these deep learning models learning? Does a model trained to spot skin cancer in clinical images, for example, actually learn the colors and textures of cancerous tissue, or is it flagging some other features or patterns? These powerful machine-learning models are typically based……

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“For me, this project is about making science visible in society,” says Herlinde Koelbl, a renowned German photo artist whose portrait series, “Fascination of Science,” is now on display at MIT.  Koelbl set herself the goal to photograph scientists and to show their motivation, influences, and ways of thinking — through the eyes of an artist. The portraits juxtapose the subjects’ faces with scientific concepts, advice, or reflections playfully inscribed on their palms. Individually, each picture or phrase speaks……

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With new support from the Office of the Associate Provost for International Activities, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and the MIT-Africa program are expanding internship opportunities for MIT students at universities and leading academic research centers in Africa. This past summer, MISTI supported 10 MIT student interns at African universities, significantly more than in any previous year. “These internships are an opportunity to better merge the research ecosystem of MIT with academia-based research systems in Africa,” says……

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Have you ever been advised to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes?” Considering another person’s perspective can be a challenging endeavor — but recognizing our errors and biases is key to building understanding across communities. By challenging our preconceptions, we confront prejudice, such as racism and xenophobia, and potentially develop a more inclusive perspective about others. To assist with perspective-taking, MIT researchers have developed “On the Plane,” a virtual reality role-playing game (VR RPG) that simulates discrimination. In……

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