MIT's web site was ranked #1 among university web sites by the Chronicle of Higher Education in May. According to Suzana Lisanti, MIT's campus-wide information systems facilitator, the Institute's offical web server was accessed 16,131,009 times by an estimated 1.9 million people that month. This includes requests for everything from the MIT home page to those for departments, offices and personal web pages. These "hits" came from 639,861 unique addresses. The schools whose sites were second and third for most visits in May were the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Michigan.
Apollo Professor of Astronautics Laurence R. Young was awarded the 1998 Betty and David Koetser Memorial Prize by the Koetser Foundation for Brain Research in Zurich, Switzerland, on May 19. The award recognizes Professor Young's "fundamental contributions to the aerospace medical field, in particular to the study of vestibular functions and the mechanisms underlying visually-induced motion effects."
In March, Dr. Cynthia Stevens became the sixth woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Dental Science, the 100-member Academy founded by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1867. Dr. Stevens, who holds DDS and MPH degrees, has been with MIT Medical's Dental Service since 1979. She is the second African-American woman to become a member of the Academy.
Professor Krzysztof Wodiczko of architecture has won the fourth Hiroshima Art Prize from Hiroshima City, Japan. The prize, which is awarded every three years, is given to an artist whose work not only demonstrates high achievement in international contemporary art, but has also contributed to world peace. Professor Wodiczko was director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) from 1995-96 and is now head of the Interrogative Design Group in CAVS.
This fall, he will create a projection onto Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, as part of Let Freedom Ring, the inaugural exhibition of ICA/Vita Brevis, a public art installation by Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. An exhibition of Wodiczko's work will be held at the Hiroshima City Museum of Art in 1999.
Earl Miller, assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has been named a winner in the 1998 John Merck Fund Scholars Program. He and two other recipients will receive $240,000 over a four-year period. The program seeks "to encourage gifted young scientists to focus on the problems of the mentally handicapped and emotionally disturbed child," said the fund's chairman, Francis Hatch. Professor Miller was selected for his research on the neural basis of working memory and cognition.
David Epstein, professor emeritus in music and theater arts, has been named Senior Fellow in the Arts and Humanities by Philip S. Khoury, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. The announcement was made by Dean Khoury at a reception following Epstein's farewell performance with the MIT Symphony on March 14.
Jay W. Forrester, professor emeritus and senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, is the 1998 recipient of the Com-puterworld Smithsonian Program's Price Waterhouse Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement. A record of Professor Forrester's life and career will join those of other information technology leaders in the permanent research collection on information technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Professor Forrester invented random-access, coincident-current and magnetic-core computer memory. As one of the founders of MIT's Servomechanisms Laboratory, he designed feedback-control equipment for military guns and radar. He also headed design of the SAGE air defense system installed in North America. He is now supervising a group of undergraduates who are creating systems dynamics materials as a basis for much that is taught in kindergarten through high school.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on July 15, 1998.
