For Massachusetts Space Week... Be a planetary explorer!Join EAPS Professor Post-Tenure Richard Binzel as your guide for a tour of our Solar System, from the Sun to Pluto, precisely scaled to the length of MIT’s Infinite Corridor!Please register for tickets for one of the following times — Space is limited!Friday, April 25 — 11:00 a.m.Friday, April 25 — 3:00 p.m.Saturday, April 26 — 9:00 a.m.Saturday, April 26 — 12:30 p.m.Saturday, April 26 — 3:00 p.m.Sunday, April 27 — 11:00 a.m.Sunday, April 27 — 12:30 p.m.Learn more and follow the tour with the Infinite Solar System Online Guide — mobile phone and tablet-friendly! Starting point of the tour is the third floor lobby of MIT’s Building 7.Can’t join us for a guided tour? No problem! You can take a self-guided tour anytime during MIT visiting hours.Questions about the tours? Contact Allison DrovairosWhat is Massachusetts Space Week, organized by the Space Consortium?Massachusetts Space Week is an annual, week-long celebration that seeks to bridge the gap between academia and the broader community and to foster a shared enthusiasm for space science, through engaging events such as a Space Film Festival, a Space Career Fair, and more than 80 space events statewide.Launched in 2017, The Space Consortium is an MA-based 501(c)(3) non-profit led by academics and researchers working in space-related fields which organizes a series of space education & outreach initiatives, including Massachusetts Space Week and The Space Consortium (SC) Space Days, to help democratize space knowledge and connect MA-based space experts and enthusiasts with each other and with the public. Supported by the Massachusetts Space Grant, Massachusetts Space Week and The SC Space Days stand as testaments to grassroots collaboration & community effort among space experts across the state, aiming to make space science accessible to all.

Speaker: Richard Samworth (Unviersity of Cambridge)Abstract: In the context of linear regression, we construct a data-driven convex loss function with respect to which empirical risk minimisation yields optimal asymptotic variance in the downstream estimation of the regression coefficients. Our semiparametric approach targets the best decreasing approximation of the derivative of the log-density of the noise distribution. At the population level, this fitting process is a nonparametric extension of score matching, corresponding to a log-concave projection of the noise distribution with respect to the Fisher divergence. The procedure is computationally efficient, and we prove that our procedure attains the minimal asymptotic covariance among all convex M-estimators. As an example of a non-log-concave setting, for Cauchy errors, the optimal convex loss function is Huber-like, and our procedure yields an asymptotic efficiency greater than 0.87 relative to the oracle maximum likelihood estimator of the regression coefficients that uses knowledge of this error distribution; in this sense, we obtain robustness without sacrificing much efficiency.Biography: Richard Samworth obtained his PhD in Statistics from the University of Cambridge in 2004, and has remained in Cambridge since, becoming a full professor in 2013 and the Professor of Statistical Science in 2017. His main research interests are in high-dimensional and nonparametric statistics; he has developed methods and theory for shape-constrained inference, missing data, subgroup selection, data perturbation techniques (subsampling, the bootstrap, random projections, knockoffs), changepoint estimation and independence testing, amongst others. Richard currently holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant. He received the COPSS Presidents’ Award in 2018, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021 and served as co-editor of the Annals of Statistics (2019-2021).

The first 100 days of any job is a critical time. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Learn from the Hiring Manager’s perspective how to prioritize between gaining job knowledge, developing a peer network, and exceeding expectations in execution. Review and improve examples of real starting assignments and 100-day plans to inform your own.

The International Fair (iFair) is the flagship annual event of the International Students Association (ISA), held every spring at MIT. Celebrating global diversity, iFair brings together over 50 international and cultural clubs to share the richness of their traditions, heritage, and creativity. From vibrant booths offering food, art, and interactive experiences to live performances including music, dance, martial arts, and a colorful fashion show, iFair transforms campus into a cultural mosaic. With thousands of attendees each year, iFair is a celebration of community, identity, and the many cultures that call MIT home.

A 50 minute, (usually) student-led tour of MIT D-Lab, D-Lab prototypes, and our workshop! Hear about the 23-year history of D-Lab, our founding director Amy Smith, our 12+ MIT classes, research groups, humanitarian innovation program and more! Not free at tour time? Stop by anytime to look around or email d-lab-tours@mit.edu.

Have some fun(nel) on a tunnel or sun(nel) walk! Join us for a 30-minute volunteer-led walk either through MIT’s famous tunnel system or around Killian Court. As the weather gets warmer, walk leaders may choose to take the group outside. Is the weather warm and you missed the start? Find the group on Killian Court and join in!Sun(nel) Walk Leaders will identify themselves by holding a white flag at the meeting location.Location details: Meet in the atrium by the staircase. [See image below]Prize Drawing: Attend a walk and scan a QR code from the walk leaders to be entered into a drawing for a getfit canvas boat tote bag at the end of the getfit challenge. The more walks you attend, the more entries you get. Winner will be drawn and notified at the end of April. Winner does not need to be a getfit participant.Disclaimer: Tunnel walks are led by volunteers. In the rare occasion when a volunteer isn’t able to make it, we will do our best to notify participants. In the event we are unable to notify participants and a walk leader does not show up, we encourage you to walk as much as you feel comfortable doing so. We recommend checking this calendar just before you head out.Getfit is a 12-week fitness challenge for the entire MIT community. These tunnel walks are open to the entire MIT community and you do not need to be a current getfit participant to join.

We are recruiting undergraduate students to present posters about their BE-related research projects in our symposium for a 60-minute time slot. As a participant, you will learn how to design and pitch your poster from the BE Communication Lab, and have your poster printed for free by BE-IT.You’ll have the opportunity to discuss your work with the fabulous folks who make up our department while enjoying free food and drinks (not to mention, symposium presentations always strengthen a CV). Oh, and those who present the best posters will be awarded prizes! What’s not to love?If you are interested, talk to your research advisor, and sign up here.

Book: Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse.All are welcome, even if you haven't read the book. Feel free to bring your own tea or coffee and enjoy a great conversation with fellow book lovers.If you are interested in joining the discussion, please email this.is.jemma.koo@gmail.com.

Date/Time: Friday April 25, 2-4pm ESTIn-person location: 46-6011 (Simons Center for the Social Brain)Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/3188129440Title: Multi-Object Working Memory and Motion Prediction in the Primate BrainAbstract:Primates excel at rapid learning and flexible generalization in many domains. For example, we can learn how to drive a car after just a few hours of practice, then readily generalize when driving an unfamiliar car. Rapid learning and flexible generalization are thought to rely on a reusable mental model of the world in terms of objects and how objects move. However, the mechanisms by which the brain represents scenes of objects and predicts their motion are largely mysterious. To address this knowledge gap, we studied (i) how the brain represents multi-object scenes, and (ii) how the brain predicts the motion of an object through time. For both of these questions, we considered long-standing cognitive theories and tested these theories in neural data, namely neural activity recorded from monkeys trained on multi-object representation and prediction tasks. In this defense I will present the outcomes of this work, focusing primarily on the neural mechanisms of motion prediction.

Page lab I "Epigenomic Landscape of the Human "Inactive" X Chromosome"

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

Speaker: Andrei Negut (EPFL)In person or on Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92441268505Title: q-characters for quantum loop algebrasAbstract: The representation theory of quantum affine algebras has been the subject of intense study for almost 30 years, an important aspect of which are the q-characters introduced by Frenkel-Reshetikhin. I will survey recent developments that generalize this framework (specifically that of the Hernandez-Jimbo category O) to quantum loop groups associated to any Kac-Moody Lie algebra, and introduce new shuffle algebra tools for the computation of q-characters.

For Massachusetts Space Week... Be a planetary explorer!Join EAPS Professor Post-Tenure Richard Binzel as your guide for a tour of our Solar System, from the Sun to Pluto, precisely scaled to the length of MIT’s Infinite Corridor!Please register for tickets for one of the following times — Space is limited!Friday, April 25 — 11:00 a.m.Friday, April 25 — 3:00 p.m.Saturday, April 26 — 9:00 a.m.Saturday, April 26 — 12:30 p.m.Saturday, April 26 — 3:00 p.m.Sunday, April 27 — 11:00 a.m.Sunday, April 27 — 12:30 p.m.Learn more and follow the tour with the Infinite Solar System Online Guide — mobile phone and tablet-friendly! Starting point of the tour is the third floor lobby of MIT’s Building 7.Can’t join us for a guided tour? No problem! You can take a self-guided tour anytime during MIT visiting hours.Questions about the tours? Contact Allison DrovairosWhat is Massachusetts Space Week, organized by the Space Consortium?Massachusetts Space Week is an annual, week-long celebration that seeks to bridge the gap between academia and the broader community and to foster a shared enthusiasm for space science, through engaging events such as a Space Film Festival, a Space Career Fair, and more than 80 space events statewide.Launched in 2017, The Space Consortium is an MA-based 501(c)(3) non-profit led by academics and researchers working in space-related fields which organizes a series of space education & outreach initiatives, including Massachusetts Space Week and The Space Consortium (SC) Space Days, to help democratize space knowledge and connect MA-based space experts and enthusiasts with each other and with the public. Supported by the Massachusetts Space Grant, Massachusetts Space Week and The SC Space Days stand as testaments to grassroots collaboration & community effort among space experts across the state, aiming to make space science accessible to all.

Presented by the Emerson/Harris Program for Private Study Solo Recital SeriesProgramTBDLivestream: https://mta.mit.edu/viewlisten/live-killian-hallAbout the PerformersAbout the Emerson/Harris Program for Private StudySupport for private musical study is available for students through the Emerson/Harris Program (E/HP), which offers merit-based financial awards for outstanding achievement on instruments or voice in classical, jazz, or world music. Each academic year, the program awards Scholarships and Fellowships to nearly seventy students who commit to a full year’s study and participate in the musical life of MIT.Auditions for the program are held at the beginning of each academic year. Private teacher selections, made in consultation with the E/HP jury heads, may include instructors from MIT staff and throughout Greater Boston. The Emerson/Harris Program is funded by the late Mr. Cherry L. Emerson, Jr. (SM, 1941), in response to an appeal from AssociateProvost Ellen T. Harris (Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus of Music). The Emerson/Harris Masterclass Series is supported, in part, by the Robert L. Malster (1956) Fund.This project is presented as part of Artfinity, an Institute-sponsored event celebrating creativity and community at MIT. Artfinity is organized by the Office of the Arts.

Speaker: Fedor Nazarov (Kent State University)Title: The quasi-monotonicity property for eigenfunctions of the Laplacian on smooth Riemannian manifolds.Abstract:We'll discuss a very simple but quite powerful idea that allows one to recover several classical results about the behavior of the eigenfunctions and to obtain a couple of new ones. This is a work in progress with Eugenia Malinnikova and Stefano Decio.--*Note the unique day and location*

Time: 3:00 PMLocation: Cambridge, MA

Title: The Insecurity of Machine LearningAbstract: The development of deep neural networks in the last decade had revolutionized machine learning and led to major improvements in our ability to perform many computational and cognitive tasks. However, this was accompanied by the discovery that deep neural networks are extremely fragile, and it is very easy to fool any neural network by making tiny changes in its inputs. These adversarial examples make it difficult to trust the results of such computations when the input can be manipulated by an adversary, and this problem has many applications and implications in object recognition, autonomous driving, cyber security, etc.In this talk I will describe a simple conceptual framework which enables us to think about this surprising phenomena from a fresh perspective, turning the existence of adversarial examples in deep neural networks from a baffling mystery into an unavoidable consequence of the geometry of the high dimensional input space. Time permitting, I will then describe several other surprising results on the security of deep neural networks, including how one can backdoor state of the art facial recognition systems by mathematically modifying a small fraction of their weights, and how one can efficiently extract all the weights of a network by analyzing its answers for a small number of chosen queries.

Time: 4:00 PMLocation: Cambridge, MA

Presented by the Emerson/Harris Program for Private Study Solo Recital SeriesProgramTBDLivestream: https://mta.mit.edu/viewlisten/live-killian-hallAbout the PerformersAbout the Emerson/Harris Program for Private StudySupport for private musical study is available for students through the Emerson/Harris Program (E/HP), which offers merit-based financial awards for outstanding achievement on instruments or voice in classical, jazz, or world music. Each academic year, the program awards Scholarships and Fellowships to nearly seventy students who commit to a full year’s study and participate in the musical life of MIT.Auditions for the program are held at the beginning of each academic year. Private teacher selections, made in consultation with the E/HP jury heads, may include instructors from MIT staff and throughout Greater Boston. The Emerson/Harris Program is funded by the late Mr. Cherry L. Emerson, Jr. (SM, 1941), in response to an appeal from AssociateProvost Ellen T. Harris (Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus of Music). The Emerson/Harris Masterclass Series is supported, in part, by the Robert L. Malster (1956) Fund.This project is presented as part of Artfinity, an Institute-sponsored event celebrating creativity and community at MIT. Artfinity is organized by the Office of the Arts.

Join Us for Two Pub Nights This April with MIT Spouses & Partners Connect! 🍻🎉 Enjoy complimentary snacks (courtesy of MS&PC, while they last) and affordable drinks for purchase (cash only). Don’t miss out on the fun—come mingle, relax, make new friends, and meet old ones.✅ Registration is required and must be confirmed, as space is limited. ✅ Please bring your MIT ID and a valid passport/local ID (21+).If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to spousesandpartners@mit.edu.💡 Only for MIT Spouses & Partners Connect members.