Hiroshi Ishii and the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab have pioneered new ways for people to interact with computers, with the invention of the “tangible user interface.”It began with a vision of "Tangible Bits," where users can manipulate ordinary physical objects to access digital information. It evolved into a bolder vision of "Radical Atoms," where materials can change form and reconfigure themselves just as pixels can on a screen. This experimental exhibit of three iconic works — SandScape, inFORM, and TRANSFORM — is part of the MIT Museum's ongoing efforts to collect the physical machines as well as preserve the user experience of, in Ishii's words, making atoms dance.Learn more about the exhibits here, or watch the YouTube video of Hiroshi Ishii's talk at the MIT Museum below.This is an ongoing exhibition in our MIT Collects exhibition.

Janet Echelman's Remembering the Future widens our perspective in time, giving sculptural form to the history of the Earth's climate from the last ice age to the present moment, and then branching out to visualize multiple potential futures.Constructed from colored twines and ropes that are braided, knotted and hand-spliced to create a three-dimensional form, the immersive artwork greets you with its grand scale presiding over the MIT Museum lobby.This large-scale installation by 2022-2024 MIT Distinguished Visiting Artist Janet Echelman, was developed during her residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). Architect, engineer and MIT Associate Professor Caitlin Mueller collaborated on the development of the piece.The title, Remembering the Future was inspired by the writings commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: "The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have."As the culmination of three years of dedicated research and collaboration, this site-specific installation explores Earth's climate timeline, translating historical records and possible futures into sculptural form.Echelman's climate research for this project was guided by Professor Raffaele Ferrari and the MIT Lorenz Center, creators of En-ROADS simulator which uses current climate data and modeling to visualize the impact of environmental policies and actions on energy systems.Learn more about Janet Echelman and the MIT Museum x CAST Collaboration.Learn more about the exhibition at the MIT Museum.

On view October 1 -- December 11, 2025This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

Ten minutes for your mind@2:50 every day at 2:50 pm in multiple time zones:Europa@2:50, EET, Athens, Helsinki (UTC+2) (7:50 am EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298032734Atlantica@2:50, EST, New York, Toronto (UTC-4) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85349851047Pacifica@2:50, PST, Los Angeles, Vancouver (UTC=7) (5:50 pm EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85743543699Almost everything works better again if you unplug it for a bit, including your mind. Stop by and unplug. Get the benefits of mindfulness without the fuss.@2:50 meets at the same time every single day for ten minutes of quiet together.No pre-requisite, no registration needed.Visit the website to view all @2:50 time zones each day.at250.org or at250.mit.edu

Compass: An Experiment in CollaborationLily Tsai, Ford Professor of Political Science Adam Albright, Professor of Linguistics Emily Richmond Pollock, Associate Professor of Music. Leeland Fredlund, Senior Research Support Associate – Compass CourseLast spring, the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) launched the pilot of its new multidisciplinary offering, 21.01 Compass Course: Love, Death, and Taxes: How to Think–and Talk to Others–About Being Human. The course is designed to expose students with the tools of the humanities and social sciences to consider persistent moral and social questions central to the human experience, ultimately guiding them in shaping the kind of humans they want to be and the society they wish to help create. Compass is the result of a multi-year collaboration involving over 30 faculty from 19 departments, led by a core SHASS team and a student advisory board. Members of the Compass team, including Lily Tsai, Adam Albright, Emily Richmond Pollock, and Leela Fredlund, will discuss the challenges and rewards of large collaborations. They will show how collaborative design resulted in a Compass pedagogy that highlights the unexpected results of multidisciplinary conversations and fosters faculty vulnerability through the teaching of unfamiliar topics, transforming the class into a true collaboration between faculty and students.All are welcome. Register via ZoomAbout the SpeakersLily L. Tsai is the Director and Founder of the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) and the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as the former Chair of the MIT Faculty. Her research focuses on accountability, governance, and political participation in developing contexts, particularly in Asia and Africa. In 2014, she founded MIT GOV/LAB, a group of social and behavioral scientists and design researchers who develop and test innovations in citizen engagement and government responsiveness. By focusing on how and why citizens become active in engaging their governments, Tsai aims to bridge researcher and practitioner communities by developing learning collaborations that can respond to governance challenges using empirical evidence in real time. Tsai has written two books, When People Want Punishment: Retributive Justice and the Puzzle of Authoritarian Popularity, and Accountability Without Democracy: Solidarity Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China, as well as articles in The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Political Behavior, Comparative Politics, and World Development.Emily Richmond Pollock is an Associate Professor of Music. Emily’s research focuses particularly on conservatism, the historicization of modernist musical value, operatic institutions, and the relationship between modern musical style and convention. Emily joined Music and Theater Arts in 2012 and regularly teaches 21M.011 Introduction to Western Music and courses on opera, the twentieth century, and the symphonic repertoire, as well as the Advanced Seminar for music majors. She is currently the music major advisor and has served in the past as a Burchard Faculty Fellow and as an advisor to first-years and music concentrators. She remains an active amateur oboist, performing with the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra and the Mercury Orchestra.Adam Albright received his BA in linguistics from Cornell University in 1996 and his Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA in 2002. He was a Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2002-2004, and is currently a Professor at MIT. His research interests include phonology, morphology, and learnability, with an emphasis on using computational modeling and experimental techniques to investigate issues in phonological theory. Other interests include: Yiddish phonology and morphology; Lakhota phonology and morphology (and many other topics in Lakhota); and the proper treatment of historical change within Optimality Theory.

Prisoner No. 626710 is Present (2023), 60 minutes. | Lalit Vachani (director)Introduction by Sana Aiyar (History)Topic: Citizenship Laws in India, Student Activism, Coming of AgeOn September 13, 2020, Umar Khalid, a charismatic student leader who recently finished his PhD at India’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, was arrested under the draconian UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) – a law that designates individuals as terrorists and allows the Indian state to imprison people without due process. His crime? As an Indian Muslim, he had dared to protest against the new citizenship law that the Indian state was trying to impose on its people.Using found footage of his past speeches along with a forensic analysis of how he was framed by the right-wing, Hindu nationalist media, Umar Khalid’s close friends Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta reconstruct the chronology of events that led to his tragic imprisonment. There have been 15 bail hearing adjournments. His case has not yet come up for trial. He and his friends still await a fair hearing in court.Cinema at the Nexus is an institute-wide film series showcasing films/documentaries that grapple with pressing issues of our day aiming to make some sense of what we are experiencing today.Other events in the series:Cinema at the Nexus: "The Cost of AI" | Introduction by Eric Robsky Huntley, October 27Cinema at the Nexus: Citizenfour | Introduction by Mariel Garcia-Montes (HASTS) and Michelle Spektor (SERC), November 4Supported by the SHASS Dean’s grant, hosted by the MIT Libraries.Pizza and light refreshments will be served.

Talk Title: Seeing “How”Abstract: TBDBio: Chaz Firestone is Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also appointed in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Cognitive Science. At JHU, he directs the Perception and Mind Lab, an interdisciplinary group of researchers studying how we see, how we think, and especially how these processes interact.https://perception.jhu.eduFollowed by a reception with food and drink in 3rd floor atrium

Louise Laage (Georgetown University)

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)

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.

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

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.