A celebration of creativity and community at MITArtfinity is a new festival of the arts at MIT featuring 80 free performing and visual arts events, celebrating creativity and community at the Institute. Artfinity launches with the opening of the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building on February 15, 2025, continues with a concentration of events February 28-March 16, and culminates with the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts public lecture by 2025 recipient artist and designer Es Devlin on May 1, 2025, and a concert by Grammy-winning rapper and Visiting Professor Lupe Fiasco on May 2, 2025. Artfinity embodies MIT’s commitment to creativity, community, and the intersection of art, science and technology. We invite you to join us in this celebration, explore the diverse events, and experience the innovative spirit that defines the arts at MIT.About the Artists Artfinity features the innovative work of MIT faculty, students, staff, and alumni, alongside guest artists from the Greater Boston area and beyond.About the Activities & Events All 80 events are open to the public, including dozens of concerts and performances plus an array of visual arts such as projections, films, installations, exhibitions, and augmented reality experiences, as well as lectures and workshops for attendees to participate in. With a wide range of visual and performing arts events open to all, Artfinity embodies MIT’s commitment to the arts and the intersection of art, science, and technology.About the Presenters Artfinity is an institute-sponsored event organized by the Office of the Arts at MIT with faculty leads Institute Professor of Music Marcus Thompson and Professor of Art, Culture and Technology Azra Akšamija. Departments, labs, centers, and student groups across MIT are presenting partners.Visit arts.mit.edu for more information about the arts at MIT.

February 26, 2025 - July 17, 2025Hidden within MIT’s Distinctive Collections, many architectural elements from the earliest days of the Institute’s architecture program still survive as part of the Rotch Art Collection. Among the artworks that conservators salvaged was a set of striking windows of gypsum and stained-glass, dating to the late 18th- to 19th c. Ottoman Empire. This exhibition illuminates the life of these historic windows, tracing their refracted histories from Egypt to MIT, their ongoing conservation, and the cutting-edge research they still prompt.The Maihaugen Gallery (14N-130) is open Monday through Thursday, 10am - 4pm, excluding Institute holidays.

Speaker: Mo ChenTitle: New Regimes for Topology Optimization in PhotonicsZoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91981902244

Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92562397534----- Speaker: Gasser ElbannaAffiliation: McDermott LabTitle: Modeling Continuous Speech Recognition to Understand Contextual Effects in Human Speech PerceptionAbstract: Humans excel at transforming acoustic waveforms into meaningful linguistic representations, despite the inherent variability of speech signals. The perceptual and neural mechanisms that enable such robust perception remain unclear. Progress has been limited by the lack of 1) stimulus-computable models that replicate human behavior and 2) large-scale behavioral benchmarks for comparing model and human speech perception. I will present our work on developing candidate models of continuous speech perception along with new behavioral experiments to compare phonemic judgments in humans and models. Our models reproduce patterns of human responses and confusions, and by manipulating the model’s access to past and future speech input, we are testing the role of context in shaping human speech perception.Bio: Gasser is a second-year PhD student in the Speech and Hearing, Bioscience and Technology (SHBT) program at Harvard University. He works with Josh McDermott at the Laboratory for Computational Audition at MIT. His research aims to understand how the brain dynamically perceives, encodes, and integrates speech information over time, thereby unraveling the perceptual and neural foundations of auditory intelligence.

Tuesday 12:00-1:00 EDT, April 22, 2025 live stream via Zoom: Registration requiredAbstract:Transformers are the dominant architecture for language modeling (and generative AI more broadly). The attention mechanism in Transformers is considered core to the architecture and enables accurate sequence modeling at scale. However, the complexity of attention is quadratic in input length, which makes it difficult to apply Transformers to model long sequences. Moreover, Transformers have theoretical limitations when it comes to the class of problems it can solve, which prevents their being able to model certain kinds of phenomena such as state tracking. This talk will describe some recent work on efficient alternatives to Transformers which can overcome these limitations.Bio:Yoon Kim is an assistant professor at MIT EECS and a principal investigator at CSAIL, where he works on natural language processing and machine learning. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University.

"The Right Problem to Solve" with Christine Taylor-ButlerAbout the presentation: A recent survey shows the US ranks 36th in global literacy. While serving on MIT's Educational Council, Christine saw a growing number of urban and rural students entering 12th grade without the appropriate skills. She wondered: what if you took literacy and STEAM concepts and embedded them in an epic adventure? And what if the characters were different than those seen in traditional literature? Ten years later, the Lost Tribes was published. The first books were used during an MIT summer middle school program. In addition, one librarian reported a student whose reading score doubled. Come learn how an MIT engineer switched gears mid-career to help grow a new generation of independent readers.Christine is completing her second year as an MLK Scholar sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.This event is hybrid. Please choose your ticket accordingly.We are committed to making this event fully accessible to everyone who wants to attend. Please let us know if there is anything you need to participate fully in this event by e-mailing vulfp@mit.edu.Photographs and/or videos may be taken at this event.By entering and attending this event, you acknowledge and agree that your likeness and/or voice may be included in photos and videos of the event and used by MIT in connection with communications about the Institute Community and Equity Office or in other MIT communications.If you do not agree to this usage, please notify the event organizer or do not enter the event.