Events Calendar

Suraj Malladi Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management

In 2020 Coloradoans narrowly passed a referendum to reintroduce wolves. Where many people saw benefits, some livestock producers saw a dismal future with a predator that was extirpated more than 80 years ago. Researchers and educators at Colorado State University formed the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence to facilitate finding and distributing solutions. For livestock producers, the team successfully conducted new research and leveraged lessons from other western states where wolves were reintroduced over 25 years earlier. Despite these efforts, and those from the state and other supporters, wolf reintroduction fostered distrust among many producers. Dr. Hoag, a professor of resource and agricultural economics at Colorado State University, will discuss his research and experiences with state wildlife agencies and livestock producers to tell this interesting story about how reintroduction has unfolded.Join Professor Dana Hoag, a J-WAFS Visiting Scholar, for this seminar to learn more on Thursday, November 13 at 4 p.m. ET. The seminar is open to the MIT community as well as community members from surrounding academic institutions. Registration is required. Click the button below to register now.

A series of talks on OR-related topics. For more information see: https://orc.mit.edu/seminars-events/

Speaker: Yonghwan Kim (MIT)Title: Simple homotopy theory for Fukaya categories

Explore how your research can transform the fight against cancerAI/ML powered research areas may include: Generative Biology, Bioanalytical Pipelines, Therapeutic Manufacturing, Nanoparticle & RNA Design, Patient Matching & Digital Biomarkers, Imaging, Digital Twins and Predictive ToxicologyWhat you’ll get:A greater understanding of why your technology has value, and to whomGuided opportunities to find a market for your technology—quite possible one that had not been previous considered!An increased appreciation for what it takes to commercialize technology and the barriers to adoptionAn expanded network of like-minded peers, instructors, investors, potential customers, and mentors

This November, discover how sleep, dreams, and light collide at the MIT Museum.Start the evening with a lively talk by Dr. Charles Czeisler and learn how light shapes the way we sleep, wake, and feel.Next, step inside Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams and let pulses of light, sound, and motion guide your mind. Created by artists Carsten Höller, Adam Haar Horowitz, and Seth Riskin, the installation allows three sleepers at a time to drift into a shared, collective dream. After Dark guests are invited to participate in this immersive five-minute experience.Test your circadian smarts in a playful game by Olivia Walch that shows how signals from light can help you beat jet lag or wake up refreshed.Then, get hands-on with cyanotype-making, experimenting with light and shadow in a creative, playful way.Local craft beer from Aeronaut and Japanese eats from Pagu, available for purchase.This month's After Dark is held in conjunction with Lighten Up! On Biology and Time, an exhibition exploring the intimate connection between living organisms and the natural cycle of light and dark.

Bissera V. Pentcheva, Stanford University The Pursuit of Heights: Romanesque Architecture, Aquitanian Notation, and the Office of Sainte-Foy at Conques Presented with the HTC Forum Part of the MIT Fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series.With rare exceptions medieval art is predominantly studied through the visual and textual, even though it was originally designed to be experienced in the temporal medium of sound: chant, recitation, prayer. In character, medieval art resembles other more recent multi-media art forms such as opera and film. I draw inspiration from the latter, especially in the concept of AudioVision introduced by the composer and film scholar Michel Chion. My work on Hagia Sophia and the interaction of architecture, acoustics, and chant, has helped articulate this new direction of studies in the audiovisuality of premodern art.A few sites offer unique richness of artistic media–architecture, sculpture, music, poetry – that have survived by serendipity but were originally designed to be experienced simultaneously. This medieval archive was meant to double as a repertoire. The monastery of Sainte-Foy at Conques offers one such example: it boasts the ninth-century golden statue of its eponymous saint, which is considered the earliest extant three-dimensional sculpture in the post-Classical Latin West. Its Romanesque church harkens back to the 1040s and together with the relief sculpture of the 1060s-1115 offers the stage for the liturgical performance. Finally and most importantly for this study, the monastery preserves a medieval Office (festal liturgy) designed in the eleventh century at Conques for the patron Sainte-Foy and intended to be performed across a long duration (from vespers on the eve of the feast, throughout the night and then the day of the feast finishing at compline). The Office is transmitted in two medieval MSS (Paris, BnF, MS Lat 1240 and NAL 443) dated to fourth quarter of the eleventh century. Musicologist have largely ignored this medieval repertoire. The project “EnChanted Images” I direct at Stanford University (http: enchantedimages.stanford.edu) has brought this medieval repertoire to the attention of both scholars and performers. Laura Steenberge, a composer and member of the team, has transcribed the Office from the medieval MSS. I had translated the Latin lyrics and have engaged in audiovisual analysis, exploring how the chants and the acoustics of Conques shaped the perception of the saint at Conques.The focus of my talk is on the phenomenon of the pursuit of height. I will trace it in the architecture at Conques that expands the interior volume by building in height; in the hearing of harmonics during the singing of the psalmody; in the development of the Aquitanian music notation (in which the Conques Office is written) that records pitch as height; in the stacking of the sculptural program; and in the melodic design of the chants. I will argue that audiovision activates a series of images in the imagination of the participants which layer over the architectural space and the material objects. These “icons of sound” lack material density and invite us to consider the role of sound in shaping the experience of the metaphysical. In turn, the principle of en-figuring the divine aniconicly through the voice and in the imagination of the participants reveals parallels with Islamic art and invites a dialogue in the study of the two traditions.BioBissera V. Pentcheva is the Victoria and Roger Sant professor of Art at Stanford University. Her innovative work focuses on the interaction of art, architecture, and music in medieval art. She has published three books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, 2006 (received the Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America, 2010), The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium, 2010, and Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium, 2017 (received the 2018 American Academy of Religion Award in excellence in historical studies). She has edited two volumes: Aural Architecture in Byzantium: Music, Acoustics, and Ritual, Ashgate 2018 and Icons of Sound: Architecture, Music and Imagination in Medieval Art, Routledge, Routledge 2020. Her work is informed by anthropology, music, and phenomenology, placing the attention on the changing appearance of objects and architectural spaces. She relies on film to capture this temporal animation stirred by candlelight. Another important strand of her work engages the sonic envelope of the visual--music and acoustics--and employs auralizations that digitally imprint the performance of chant with the acoustic signature of the specific interior for which it was composed. Her current book project explores the art and music of Ste. Foy at Conques. Pentcheva's research has been supported by a number of prestigious fellowships: Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2018-2019), J. S. Guggenheim (2017-2018), American Academy in Rome (2017-2018), Mellon New Directions (2010-2012), Humboldt (2006-2009) and a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship (2000-2001).This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streamed online on YouTube.Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. HTC Forum events are made possible with the generous support of Thomas Beischer through the Lipstadt-Stieber Fund.

Silent Meditation in the Chapel on Thursdays 6-8pm, open to everyone in the MIT Community. Some sessions include Guided Meditation at 6:30pm.

Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society, GBC/ACM and MIT Student Chapter of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)7:00 PM, Thursday, 13 November 2025MIT Room 32-G449 (Kiva) and online via ZoomEasy Acceleration with Distributed Arrays on the World’s Largest Interactive AI SupercomputerJeremy KepnerPlease register in advance for this seminar even if you plan to attend in person athttps://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/1017607373508/WN_lYs4lxKfSlGkMVq71ibN-gAfter registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.Indicate on the registration form if you plan to attend in person. This will help us determine whether the room is close to reaching capacity. We plan to serve light refreshments (probably pizza) before the talk starting at around 6:30 pm. Letting us know you will come in person will help us determine how much pizza to order.We may make some auxiliary material such as slides and access to the recording available after the seminar to people who have registered.Abstract:High level programming languages and GPU accelerators are powerful enablers for a wide range of applications. Achieving scalable vertical (within a compute node), horizontal (across compute nodes), and temporal (over different generations of hardware) performance while retaining productivity requires effective abstractions. Distributed arrays are one such abstraction that enables high level programming to achieve highly scalable performance. Distributed arrays achieve this performance by deriving parallelism from data locality, which naturally leads to high memory bandwidth efficiency. This talk explores distributed array performance on a variety of hardware. Scalable performance is demonstrated within and across CPU cores, CPU nodes, and GPU nodes. The interactive AI supercomputing hardware used spans decades and allows a direct comparison of hardware improvements over this time range.Bio:Dr. Jeremy Kepner is an MIT Lincoln Laboratory Fellow. He founded the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center and pioneered the establishment of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. He has developed novel big data and parallel computing software used by thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide. He has led several embedded computing efforts, which earned him a 2011 R&D 100 Award. Kepner has chaired the SIAM Data Mining conference, the IEEE Big Data conference, and the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference. Kepner is the author of two bestselling books, Parallel MATLAB for Multicore and Multinode Computers, and Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra. His peer-reviewed publications include works on abstract algebra, astronomy, astrophysics, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data mining, databases, graph algorithms, health sciences, plasma physics, signal processing, and 3D visualization. In 2014, he received Lincoln Laboratory's Technical Excellence Award.Kepner holds a BA degree in astrophysics from Pomona College and a PhD degree in astrophysics from Princeton University. He is a fellow of the Society of Industrial Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is a faculty advisor to the MIT SIAM student group.Directions to 32-G449 - MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA: Please use the main entrance to the Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street (the entrance closest to Main street) as those doors will be unlocked. Upon entering, proceed to the elevators which will be on the right after passing a large set of stairs and a MITAC kiosk. Take the elevator to the 4th floor and turn right, following the hall to an open area; 32-G449 will be on the left. Location of Stata on campus mapThis joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be hybrid (in person and online).Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

Julia Weist’s artistic practice is defined by a participatory aesthetic in which her artworks are shaped by the systems they foreground as subjects.Across various mediums, with a recent focus on photography, Weist is known for her deeply collaborative approach that emphasizes discovery as a defining factor in shaping material choices, formal qualities and display strategies.Weist goes to remarkable lengths to gain access and build relationships, and the results of these efforts are often surprising. Weist embedded for a year within New York City government and developed an artistic and bureaucratic process to ensure that her artworks would be classified as government records. Rubrics, one of the works in this series, was acquired by the List Center Collection. In 2022, the artist positioned her practice as the investigative experience required to earn a private investigator license and was approved; she now has access to information that’s collected and sold to law enforcement, including a database of timestamped images of vehicles on the road.This event will highlight the connections between these bodies of work and will cover how they’re currently evolving and guiding her practice. The lecture will be followed by a food and wine reception.6:30 PM - Program start time 7:30 PM - Wine ReceptionSpeaker BioJulia Weist (b. 1984) is a visual artist based in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Jewish Museum among other collections. She has recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Queens Museum and The Shed and internationally at the Hong-Gah Museum, Taiwan; nGbK, Berlin; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam and the Gwangju Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Private Eye at Moskowitz Bayse and Governing Body at Rachel Uffner Gallery. Her latest public artwork, Campaign, debuted in Times Square in 2022.About the Lavine Lecture SeriesThe Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture Series was established to honor the Lavines, two prominent Boston art patrons and longtime supporters of the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lectures bring to the Boston community distinguished art world figures for talks on modern and contemporary art.

MIT Theater PresentsA Dream Like a Dream如夢之夢a play by Stan Lai 賴聲川directed by Jay Scheib with Xinyu Xu '25A meteor of the Chinese contemporary theater told through the eyes of over 100 characters onstage, offstage, backstage, and beyond from Shanghai to Paris and back. Paths intertwine and aspirations collide along a spiral littered with life in an epic and immersive meditation on our most unexpected and unfathomable desires, passionate loves, losses, jubilance, loneliness, and laughter...Performed by MIT Students and members of the MIT communityDesigned by Joseph Lark-Riley, Christian Frederickson, Shanise DeSilva, Anna Borou Yu, Peter Torpey, and Xinyu Xu; Director of Production Maggie Moore; Stage management by Debra Acquavella, and Joanna Xuanye Su; Directed by Jay Scheib with Xinyu Xu '25All Performances at Building W97 Theater345 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139Part 1 — Thursday, November 13 at 7:30pmPart 2 — Friday, November 14 at 7:30pmParts 1 + 2 (with included meal break) Saturday, November 15 at 3:30pm + 7:30pmPart 1 — Thursday, November 20 at 7:30pmPart 2 — Friday, November 21 at 7.30pmParts 1 + 2 (with included meal break) Saturday, November 22 at 3:30pm + 7:30pmEach part is a stand-alone performance. Audiences may see Part 1, Part 2, or both either on the same day or on separate days. Both of the “marathon,” two-part days will include a beautiful meal by Taiwanese restaurant, Mu Lan.For questions please reach out to both Yi Tu and Maggie Moore via yitu@mit.edu and mooremag@mit.edu.

Time: 7:00 PM ET (4:00 PM PT)Location: Pasadena, CA

Information+ is a biennial conference that brings together researchers, educators, and practitioners in information design and data visualization to explore shared questions and challenges in these rapidly changing fields. We aim to provoke rich, interdisciplinary discourse on how information representation engages within social, political and environmental contexts.Interdisciplinary practices in information design and visualization 14–16 November 2025 Boston, MA USAEvents on Friday November 14 will be held at MITEvents on Saturday November 15, and Sunday November 16th will be held at Northeastern

Chemistry Student Seminar (CSS) is a student-organized seminar series that host graduate students and postdocs to share their research in a friendly and informal environment. Free donuts and coffee are provided.

The irony of artificial intelligence is that it often reveals more about human intelligence than machines themselves.From AI in the home to robots in the workplace, the presence of AI all around us compels us to question its potential and recognize the risks. What has become clear is that the more we advance AI technology and consider machine ability versus human ability, the more we need to mind the gap.Researchers at MIT have been at the forefront of this evolving field. The work presented in this exhibition builds on the pioneering contributions of figures such as Claude Shannon and Seymour Papert, while highlighting contemporary research that spans computer science, mechanical engineering, neuroscience, and the social sciences.As research probes the connections between human and machine intelligence, it also underscores the profound differences. With AI now embedded in everyday life — from smart assistants in our homes to robots in the workplace — we are challenged to ask critical questions about its potential, its risks, and the boundaries between machine ability and human capability.Join us in shining light on the tremendous promise, unforeseen impacts, and everyday misconceptions of AI in this riveting, interactive exhibition.Learn more about the exhibition.

Imagine different worlds in Cosmograph: Speculative Fictions for the New Space Age, an exhibition that brings art and science together to examine possible futures where outer space is both a frontier for human exploration and a new territory for exploitation and development by private enterprise.We are living at the dawn of a New Space Age. What will the future hold? Will space elevators bring humanity's space junk to turn it into useful material here on Earth? Will asteroid mining be the next frontier in prospecting? Will the promise of geo-engineering turn into a nightmare of unintended consequences?Explore these possibilities and more in our new exhibition that blurs the lines between fact and fantasy, and art and science.

MIT is not a place so much as it is a unique collection of exceptional people.What is essential at MIT is asking questions others may not ask, trying the unexpected in pursuit of a greater solution, and embracing distinctive skills and combinations of talents. Whether encompassing global issues, ventures into space, or efforts to improve our daily lives, stories told in this exhibit showcase the process of discovery that sits at the heart of MIT.Delve into the experimental culture and collaborative spirit of the MIT community in this dynamic and interactive exploration of groundbreaking projects and ongoing innovation."MIT’s greatest invention may be itself—an unusual concentration of unusual talent, forever reinventing itself on a mission to make a better world." — President L. Rafael ReifLocated in the Brit J. (1961) and Alex (1949) d'Arbeloff GallerySupported by the Biogen Foundation

How can code be used as a creative tool by artists and designers?This question motivates the work of the Future Sketches group at the MIT Media Lab. Led by artist and educator Zach Lieberman, the group aims to help us “see” code by using it to make artistically controlled, computer-generated visuals.Explore some of the latest research from the group that uses typography and digital tools to create interactive, creative, and immersive work.Located in our Martin J. (1959) and Eleanor C. Gruber Gallery.

Experience the captivating work of Arthur Ganson, where his perceptions of the world are choreographed into the subtle movements and gestures of his artistic machines."These machines are daydreams condensed into physical form, computer programs manifesting in three-dimensional space." - Arthur GansonArthur Ganson's medium is a feeling or idea inspired by the world he perceives around him – from the delicate fluttering of paper to the sheer scale of the universe. Combining engineering genius with whimsical choreography, he creates machines to encode those ideas into the physical world. But he invites everyone to draw their own conclusions on the meaning behind the subtle gestures of the machines.Currently on display are a select group of Arthur Ganson's works from our MIT Museum Collection. We expect to exhibit his work in large numbers in the future.