Author: Ms. R.

Peter H. Fisher, the Thomas A. Frank (1977) Professor of Physics, will step down as the head of the Department of Physics, effective Aug. 31. He will begin his new role as the head of the Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) — a venture through the Office of the Vice President for Research that will address the Institute’s research computing needs, in science and across MIT.  Associate Professor Anna Frebel will head a search committee that will……

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Modern machine-learning models, such as neural networks, are often referred to as “black boxes” because they are so complex that even the researchers who design them can’t fully understand how they make predictions. To provide some insights, researchers use explanation methods that seek to describe individual model decisions. For example, they may highlight words in a movie review that influenced the model’s decision that the review was positive. But these explanation methods don’t do any good if humans can’t……

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The flashing of a nearby star has drawn MIT astronomers to a new and mysterious system 3,000 light years from Earth. The stellar oddity appears to be a new “black widow binary” — a rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, that is circling and slowly consuming a smaller companion star, as its arachnid namesake does to its mate. Astronomers know of about two dozen black widow binaries in the Milky Way. This newest candidate, named ZTF J1406+1222, has the……

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Humans observe the world through a combination of different modalities, like vision, hearing, and our understanding of language. Machines, on the other hand, interpret the world through data that algorithms can process. So, when a machine “sees” a photo, it must encode that photo into data it can use to perform a task like image classification. This process becomes more complicated when inputs come in multiple formats, like videos, audio clips, and images. “The main challenge here is, how……

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The most recent United Nations climate change report indicates that without significant action to mitigate global warming, the extent and magnitude of climate impacts — from floods to droughts to the spread of disease — could outpace the world’s ability to adapt to them. The latest effort to introduce meaningful climate legislation in the United States Congress, the Build Back Better bill, has stalled. The climate package in that bill — $555 billion in funding for climate resilience and……

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If you are in Bucharest and impatiently waiting for, say, your children to head off to school in the morning, you might hear yourself saying something like, “Haideţi caţi întârziat, ce mai!” Or: “Obviously, you are late!” Uttering that sentence might not actually spur anyone into action. But in the process, it might provide interesting evidence about the way everyday language works. MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa contends that it does just that, in a new book exploring the function……

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Can you tell the story of a complex research project in only three minutes? Could a presentation emerge from extreme time compression transformed like a diamond from coal? The MIT Research Slam Public Showcase on April 11 put these questions and more center stage as the four postdoc and five PhD student finalists competed for cash prizes.  The ability to compellingly pitch scientific research to a smart but non-specialized audience is a bankable skill central to success in any……

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A new study by scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT provides the most comprehensive and rigorous evidence yet that the mammalian brain stores a single memory across a widely distributed, functionally connected complex spanning many brain regions, rather than in just one or even a few places. Memory pioneer Richard Semon had predicted such a “unified engram complex” more than a century ago, but achieving the new study’s affirmation of his hypothesis required the……

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MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is a crucible for technological innovation, but one of the most important aspects of the program’s leading global status has nothing to do with computers or circuits, artificial intelligence, or algorithms. It has to do with an elite group of educators who have dedicated their careers to ensuring that the technology, curriculum, and instructional delivery of MIT’s classroom education all keep up with the dizzying pace of its research. They’re called:……

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