MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
December 6, 2017
MIT News: around campus
A weekly digest of the Institute’s community news

MIT community gathers to honor Paul Gray

Memorial tribute celebrates former Institute president who cherished “This special place.”

Building the hardware for the next generation of artificial intelligence

Class taught by Vivienne Sze and Joel Emer brings together traditionally separate disciplines for advances in deep learning.

On 75th anniversary of first nuclear fission reactor, MIT stages tribute to seminal experiment

MIT’s historic graphite exponential pile has been restored as a tool for education and research.

Three MIT seniors awarded 2018 Marshall Scholarships

Nick Schwartz, Olivia Zhao, and Liang Zhou will pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom.

Four from MIT awarded 2018 Schwarzman Scholarships

Scholars will engage in a year of postgraduate leadership studies at Beijing’s Tshingua University.

Wei Zhang wins 2018 New Horizons in Mathematics Breakthrough Prize

MIT math professor will share award with collaborator Zhiwei Yun.

In the Media

Jeff Freilich, associate director of the CSAIL Alliance Program, spoke with Here & Now’s Robin Young about a unique collaboration between MIT researchers and their colleagues in Kentucky, “focused on the future of the work in a part of the country where the coal industry has been hemorrhaging jobs.”

Media Lab researchers have teamed up with UNICEF on a new website that uses AI to show what cities would look like if they had gone through the war in Syria. As Timothy Revell notes in New Scientist, “such destruction is hard to imagine and can lead to fewer people contributing to fundraising campaigns,” which is something the researchers hope this project will change.

A team of MIT students and postdocs has taken the top prize in the architecture category of the 2017 Mars City Design competition, reports Janussa Delzo for Newsweek. In the MIT team’s tree-inspired concept, “solar panels would play a vital role in providing energy on the Red Planet, especially if dust storms were to hit.”

MIT students Nick Schwartz, Olivia Zhao, and Liang Zhou are recipients of this year’s Marshall Scholarship, reports The Boston Globe’s J.D. Capelouto. Schwartz, Zhao, and Zhou are among the 43 students from across the country who received the scholarship, which allows them to pursue graduate studies at a British university.