Dear MIT students from every course/major, undergraduate and graduate,For the second year in a row, we are offering this three-unit, for-credit class led by instructors Prof. Olivier de Weck and Prof. Luca Carlone from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). You can view the syllabus here.In this experimental, three-week class, students will learn about the fundamentals of aerospace engineering through extended (virtual) reality. No prior experience necessary!Students who complete this class will enter a raffle to win one of two Meta Quest 3S headsets!If you are interested in this course, please fill out the following short, pre-registration survey (4-5mins), so we can tailor our instruction to this year's students. The survey also contains more information about the class, including the lecture dates: https://forms.gle/rYJs3ukn519Zc4Yt7.

Advance sign-up required by 1/15/2025Sites are often represented as static, empty plots of land. In reality, every site is an environment—an interconnected system shaped by ecological, cultural, and material relationships. These environments extend vertically into the sky, horizontally through soil and ecosystems, and inward to unseen processes such as microorganisms and material histories. How can experimental drawing and representation techniques reveal these complexities and reshape the way we design?This workshop invites participants to reimagine sites as living systems and engage in collaborative design practices. Focusing on a local, seemingly vacant lot, we will investigate the site’s temporal and spatial dynamics—tracing its layers of interaction and exploring how elements and materials influence its identity. By reframing traditional notions of scale and boundaries, we will uncover the opportunities of co-authorship amongst the environments, forces and creatures.The Wiesner Gallery will act as a hub for both a workshop and exhibition space. Each day, participants will gather in the gallery to experiment with prototypes, drawings, and multimedia techniques. Collaboration and play will guide the approach, creating an open and exploratory environment where games facilitate dialogue and negotiation. This collective exploration will reveal the site’s interconnected urban and architectural layers from the perspectives of diverse actors. The workshop will culminate in a public exhibition at the end of January, showcasing our collective discoveries.The workshop will take place daily at the Wiesner Gallery at MIT. It will culminate in an exhibition, likely Jan-31-Feb 2. Students should bring their laptops to all sessions.

These are trainings in basic laboratory skills and techniques for mammalian cell culture, transfection, and optical anaysis of mammalian cells. These modules are Level 1 and Level 2 trainings, prior experience required. (See Basic Lab Skills)The Credential Certification program in the Huang-Hobbs BioMaker Space offers participants an opportunity to learn, practice, and demonstrate proficiency in a wide range of biological laboratory techniques. Upon successful completion of the assessment, particpants are awarded a certificate of completion for the credential.Credential modules are open to all users in the MIT community who have completed the required pre-requisite trainings. All particiants must be added to the "biomakerspace" training group and complete clearance form and online trainings. Email jbuck@mit.edu to be added to the training group and for additional information about this program. Limited to 12 participants. To register, please visit http://tinyurl.com/HHBMS-IAP2025.In this series of trainings, participants will review the theory and practice of following credential modules:1) Mammalian Cell Culture - Inoculation (Tuesday 1/21) 2) Mammalian Cell Culture - Media Changing & Inverted Microscope Use (Wednesday 1/22) 3) Mammalian Cell Culture - Passaging & Cell Counting (Thursday 1/23) 4) Mammalian Cell Culture - Media Changing (Friday 1/24) 5) Mammalian Transfection - Seeding Plates (Monday 1/27) 6) Mammalian Transfection - Transfection (Tueday 1/28) 7) Fluorescent Microscopy (Wednesday 1/29) 8) Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) (Thursday 1/30) 9) Fluorescent Microscopy, FACS & Conclusions (Friday 1/31)Pre-Requisite Trainings: Basic Laboratory Skills Modules: 1) Huang-Hobbs BioMaker Space Lab Specific Training 2) Laboratory Math and Making Solutions 3) Basic Micropipette Use 4) Microbiological Culture and Sterile Technique

In this talk, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Cecilia Leal will present findings on how lipid droplets undergo structural remodeling, close-packing rigid and highly saturated triacylglycerols in response to caloric overload. This adaptation allows for optimal fat expansion during the initial stages of obesity.

Hosted by E14 Fund and MAS, this engaging workshop will bring together MIT founders to share their experiences and insights on transitioning from scientists and engineers to entrepreneurs. The workshop is designed to guide you through the entrepreneurial process, encourage meaningful connections with both experienced and budding founders, and build a supportive community of peers at various stages of their startup journey.Space is limited and applications to join are due by December 6.Sign up: https://beyondthelab.mit.edu/iapAbout the E14 Fund: The E14 Fund is the MIT-affiliated early-stage venture fund. Born at the MIT Media Lab, E14’s mission is to serve the MIT community and invest in scalable, deep-tech startups. E14 donates a significant portion of profits to MIT.

Games and Machine Learning – an MIT Independent Activities Period offeringThis course will combine a series of lectures and hackathon-style projects, the latter chosen from a list of examples or otherwise devised, to introduce students to game creation, current game-related research and an exploration of the technology, the art and the fun of video games.Sony Interactive Entertainment : The Nexus of Games and AIDescription: Computers and gaming have grown up together. Since Bertie the Brain learned to play Tic Tac Toe in 1950, computers have hosted, played, and designed increasingly sophisticated games as they have grown in power. For every computer science paper on the arXiv – from computer vision to LLMs to personal immersion to cognitive science and general AI – there are a half dozen use cases you can name in the creation of video games. Furthermore, video games provide new worlds and synthetic data that test and stretch the capabilities of machine learning models – so the relationship is synergistic.This IAP course will give a brief, project-oriented survey of some of the main research topics that are integral to the development of the future of gaming. Lecturers from Sony Interactive Entertainment, the company behind PlayStation, as well as contributors from MIT and other universities will discuss topics such as player immersion, persuadable chatbots and realistic NPCs, sentiment analysis, rendering, asset and game creation with Unreal Engine and the use of LLMs for agent planning and the development of game tutor agents. Students will choose from a list of potential course projects (or invent their own) and the final week will include student project presentations.Audience: The course is targeted at those who have an interest in video games and machine learning. There are no specific prerequisites. We encourage students with an interest in art, psychology, writing, social impact and design of games to participate.Structure: Project-oriented course combined with lectures.Readings: Readings will be dependent upon project choice and be chosen from the literature.LecturesNumber of lectures: 9Lectures:1/6/25 Mike Stopa – The lay of the land: AI in video games1/8/25 Keri Carpenter – Creating a game concierge for our games1/10/25 D. Fox Harrell, MIT: Considering the Avatar Dream: Designing and Evaluating Characters and Avatars1/13/25 Gale Lucas, USC – Cognitive science and realistic NPCs1/15/25 Ram Barankin – Using GenAI to listen social media1/17/25 Erick Flores – Neural methods to improve real time game streaming1/22/25 Logan Olson, Haven Studios – “0-to-1” game development with Generative ML1/24/25 TBD1/27/25 Final projects + TBDProject examples – students will be asked to complete a hackathon-style project for the class. The topic is completely open although several categories of projects will be suggested by our lecturers – who can then provide guidance in executing the projects. These projects do not need to be computational. Pure artistic projects designing characters, for example, would be welcome.Unreal Engine (or Unity) simple game creation (Mike)Cognitive Science and Realistic NPCs (Gale)Creating Novel Game Mechanics with LLMs (Logan)Video Enhancement, Video Quality Measurement or Codec tuning using Machine Learning (Erick)AI Generated Gamer Concierge  (Keri)A Generative AI-Powered Sentiment and Insights Tool for Social Listening (Ram)