Wall Street Journal reporter Brenda Cronin spotlights the work of I.M. Pei, an MIT alumnus and renowned architect, who died on May 16. Pei was “an architect whose graceful grids of glass and metal redrew skylines around the world,” writes Cronin.
I.M Pei, an MIT graduate and architect known for designing some of the world’s best-known buildings, has died at 102, reports Kathy McCormick and Deepti Hajela for the Associated Press. Pei’s buildings “added elegance to landscapes worldwide with their powerful geometric shapes and grand spaces.”
MIT alumnus I.M. Pei, “who was widely recognized as the most prominent American architect of his generation,” has died at age 102, reports Robert Campbell for The Boston Globe. Campbell notes that Pei “charted his own course, remaining a canonical modernist and ignoring the fads and revolutions in taste.”
Boston Globe reporter Sean Smyth spotlights how the work of the late I.M. Pei, a renowned architect and MIT alumnus, can be found throughout the MIT campus and around the world. Smyth notes that Pei’s portfolio included the Green Building at MIT, the Landau Building at MIT, the West Wing addition to the MFA in Boston and the Louvre pyramid in Paris.
Fast Company reporter Eillie Anzilotti highlights how MIT researchers have developed an AI-enabled headset device that can translate silent thoughts into speech. Anzilotti explains that one of the factors that is motivating graduate student Arnav Kapur to develop the device is “to return control and ease of verbal communication to people who struggle with it.”
TIME reporter Sean Gregory visits MIT to speak with graduate student John Urschel about his new book, and his passion for both mathematics and football. “The United States, more than any other culture, has the strange marriage of athletics and academics,” Urschel says. “I thought it was important to show that this is something that really can co-exist.”
Boston Globe reporter Emily Sweeney writes about the opening of a time capsule housed at MIT’s Stata Center. The capsule held an “array of tech treasures, including the original 1992 proposal for the World Wide Web; a 1979 user manual for VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program developed by MIT alumni Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin; and an Altair BASIC interpreter that was donated by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.”
New York Times reporter Paul Goldberger memorializes the life and work of MIT alumnus I.M. Pei, “one of the most revered architects in the world.” Goldberger writes that Pei, “maintained that he wanted not just to solve problems but also to produce ‘an architecture of ideas.’”
In an article for The Boston Globe Magazine, Neil Swidey highlights MIT as a model of “what an athletics-affirming but recruitment-light culture might look like.” “Despite refusing to put a thumb on the scale for athlete applications, MIT has produced a successful sports program that enhances, rather than detracts from, its academic reputation,” explains Swidey.
Fast Company reporter DJ Pangburn spotlights how researchers in the Mediated Matter Group have created polymers derived from organic materials that are designed to decompose. Pangburn explains that “the group’s biopolymers are designed to decompose upon reaching the end of its product life cycle, returning to the earth instead of being destined for a dump.”
CSAIL unsealed a time capsule containing artifacts from computing history at MIT after a self-taught programmer cracked the capsule’s cryptopuzzle, reports Kathryn Sotnik for NECN. MIT alumnus, Bob Frankston, who programmed the first electronic spreadsheet, noted “it’s really a reminder in a sense how long ago it was, and how much people today take these things for granted.”
Eric Kane reports for 7 News on how a time capsule at the Stata Center was unsealed at MIT this week after a Belgium programmer solved the cryptopuzzle sealing the container. The time capsule contained “MIT computing artifacts and material relating to the invention of the Internet, the ethernet, and the digital spreadsheet.”
Graduate student John Urschel discusses his new book and passion for both math and football on Fox and Friends. “Football coaches, they tell their best players to dream big,” says Urschel. “I would love to see math teachers telling their students you can be an elite mathematician, you can be a top physicist, you can even dream to be the next Einstein.”
May Mobility, a company founded by MIT alumnus Edwin Olson, will begin offering a free shuttle service on autonomous electric minibuses in Rhode Island, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. Bray explains that the company “mapped the shuttle route with lasers, which are extremely accurate, and uses an onboard laser-based guidance system that constantly confirms the bus is on track.”
MIT researchers have identified a method to help AI systems avoid adversarial attacks, reports Matthew Hutson for Science. When the researchers “trained an algorithm on images without the subtle features, their image recognition software was fooled by adversarial attacks only 50% of the time,” Hutson explains. “That compares with a 95% rate of vulnerability when the AI was trained on images with both obvious and subtle patterns.”