The Boston Globe reports on the MIT football team’s victory in the first round of the NCAA Division 3 playoffs. The Engineers kicked a field goal to force overtime, “then got a 13-yard touchdown pass from Peter Williams to Seve Esparrago to pull out a 27-20 victory over Husson.”
MIT alumnus Noam Angrist and seniors Anisha Gururaj and Elliot H. Akama-Garren were among 32 Rhodes scholars selected from the U.S. this year, reports Jennifer Smith for The Boston Globe. “The American scholars will join an international group of students chosen from 14 other global jurisdictions, according to the Rhodes Trust,” Smith reports.
Jennifer Tucker writes for The Boston Globe about research conducted by Professor Alex Pentland in the 1990s that helped to lay the groundwork for today’s facial recognition software. Pentland’s linear algebra-based system, dubbed Eigenfaces, could efficiently plot a human face by focusing on ways it deviates from the average.
Two MIT seniors and alumnus Noam Angrist have been named Rhodes Scholars, reports Dave Collins for the Associated Press. “It’s a total dream come true,” says Angrist. “The skills I will get at (Oxford) are just incredible, and I’ll come back into the world fully equipped to do what I love to do.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen takes a look at the revival of the MIT football program, which after being disbanded in 1901 was resurrected as a student-run squad in 1978. “They deserve a lot of credit for where we are today,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif of MIT’s founding football players.
Ron Mott of NBC News reports on the MIT football team and its first undefeated season. “It’s not hard to motivate them because they are very intelligent, very motivated, very passionate about what they are trying to accomplish in every facet of their lives,” says Engineers Head Coach Chad Martinovich.
When students at MIT banded together in 1978 to form a football team, another group of students came together to start the Institute’s marching band, writes Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal. “You have to have a marching band if you have a football team,” said marching band co-founder Tom Gaul.
Rheana Murray of ABC News spotlights the undefeated MIT football team. "It's nice to see our players get this kind of attention for what they're doing on the field because they are all-stars, if you will, off the field," says Head Coach Chad Martinovich. "I am really proud of them and happy for them."
Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times writes about Prof. Amy Finkelstein’s work “trying to help researchers find rigorous ways to evaluate new approaches to the health delivery system — questions about what sorts of services to offer different patients, financing methods for care, or other such questions.”
Financial Times reporter John Authers writes about a new study, co-authored by MIT Professor Evan Apfelbaum, which found that diversity among stock market traders increased pricing accuracy. “It’s not about diversity boosting performance, it’s about homogeneity tanking it,” says Apfelbaum of the study.
Boston Globe reporter Kevin Dupont writes about the winning attitude behind the MIT football team’s first-ever undefeated season. “I am out here to have fun. It is what drives me . . . to finish my work, and go to the exams, do all the work,” said Anthony Souffrant, a senior defensive back for the Engineers.
“Really it’s a tribute to the kids on the roster, the seniors in particular. When they came in as freshmen, they were 2-7 and they’ve helped really improve the program each year, along with the three recruiting classes since then,” says Head Coach Chad Martinovich of the MIT football team’s perfect season.
Graduate student Kevin Lu speaks with Heidi Legg of BetaBoston about his work transforming the way that we consume information. “We want to democratize data visualization so that anyone with data can map an image that explains things,” says Hu.
WBUR’s Deborah Becker and Lynn Jolicoeur report on the new MIT-MGH partnership aimed at developing better tools to treat disease. Prof. Arup Chakraborty hopes the collaboration will allow researchers to take risks. “Safe ideas are often not the transformative ones,” he says.
Cory Bennett of The Hill writes about a broad effort to tackle cybersecurity challenges at MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. “MIT will examine the immediate policy concerns, such as how to protect vulnerable financial and medical data, as well as emerging technologies like self-driving cars and drones,” explains Bennett.