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.

Join the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative for a conversation with Professor Jason Jay and Hibah Khan (MBA ’25) to explore the emerging field of systemic investing. Unlike traditional investing, which often focuses on standalone transactions or near-term outcomes, systemic investing is about engaging with the root causes and system interdependencies to create lasting change.This session will introduce the Systemic Investing for Social Change Starter Kit, a new resource co-created by MBA students and practitioners that offers practical tools to help investors, ecosystem builders and leaders align multiple forms of capital toward systems change. The toolkit includes frameworks for stakeholder engagement, systems mapping, multicapital deployment strategies and other practical ways to turn systems thinking into action.We’ll discuss how the Starter Kit was developed through hands-on collaboration with host investors and how it reflects the growing demand for leaders who can use systems thinking, collaborate across sectors and design for impact at scale. So, whether you’re curious about systemic investing, preparing for a career in impact or looking for tools to bring into your own work, this session will offer an introduction to an approach that redefines what it means to invest for meaningful and lasting change.

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

Francesco Fabbri UC Berkeley

Talk Title: How to Grow a Lexicon: Evidence from Babies & their WorldsAbstract: While a longstanding view in language development holds that infants don't understand words until they begin talking (around age 1), recent research in our lab and others has revealed that infants begin understanding words months earlier. In this talk I will explore two branches of my lab’s work that tackle the mechanisms of early language development, largely focused on building the early lexicon. First, I will discuss eyetracking data revealing infants’ initially imature expectations about how words sound and what they mean, and how their representations eventually become more adult-like over infancy and toddlerhood. Synthesizing across studies, I will discuss recent results showing a robust, non-linear, and arguably qualitative improvements in infants’ real-time word comprehension just after the first birthday. Second, drawing from SEEDLingS, my lab’s audio and video corpus of home recordings, I will argue that this “comprehension boost” is not well-explained by changes in language input for common words, but rather, by postulating that infants learn to take better advantage of relatively stable input data. I will propose complementary theoretical accounts of what makes older infants “better learners.” Finally, I will also discuss the dynamics of language learning in infants who are blind and infants who are Deaf/Hard of Hearing, considering how their unique perceptual experiences dovetail with their accruing linguistic knowledge.Bio: Dr. Bergelson is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in Harvard University’s Psychology Department. She received her PhD in 2013 from UPenn, completed postdoctoral work at the University of Rochester, and was a professor at Duke prior to Harvard (where she moved in 2023). Her work has been funded by the NSF, NIH, NEH, and FDA as well as various intramural and extramural foundations. She has published over 50 articles, and has received early career awards from the Fed. of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the American Psychology Foundation, the International Society for Infant Studies, the Association for Psychological Science, and Forbes Magazine, among others. Her work focuses on how young children learn language from the world around them, with a particular focus on experimental and observational measures of infants’ during the early phases of word learning.I am happy to send copies of any of our articles upon email request (or you can snag them from my Publications page).Followed by a reception with food and drink in 3rd floor atrium

Francesca Molinari (Cornell University)

Speaker: Jeck Lim (Caltech)Title:Abstract:

Speaker: George Barbastathis (MIT)

Have you ever wondered what truly shapes the future you’re working toward—whether in a project, passion, or everyday decision?In this interactive workshop, hosted by the Global Health Alliance in collaboration with MIT Radius, you’ll explore what drives your work and where your decisions take you. Using a simple yet powerful framework, we’ll reflect on:The futures you’re envisioning (big or small)The people your actions touchThe values behind your choicesThe moments when small decisions really matterBring a passion, project, or activity you care about, and we’ll guide you through thought-provoking questions designed to open up new perspectives and possibilities. You’ll leave with sharper insight into how your actions fit into the bigger picture and a clearer understanding of what truly matters to you.

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

Time: 12:00 PMLocation: Cambridge, MA

The Neurotech 2025 symposium presents six talks by neurotechnology pioneers whose cutting-edge innovations are changing the face of neurobiological research from molecules to cognition. There will also be short talks by MIT students and postdocs. The Symposium is open to the public, but seating is limited, and registration is required. Lunch will be provided while supplies last. For more information and to register for this event, visit the Neurotech 2025 website and click "Register Here" to be sent to the Eventbrite registration page.This year’s lineup includesSPEAKERS INCLUDE:ANNA DEVOR BOSTON UNIVERSITYMICHAEL FOX HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL / BWHJEFF W. LICHTMAN HARVARD UNIVERSITYMADELEINE OUDIN TUFTS UNIVERSITYXIAO WANG MIT / BROAD INSTITUTEXIN YU HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL / MGH

Speaker: Vardan Papyan (University of Toronto)Title: Attention Sinks: A ‘Catch, Tag, Release’ Mechanism for EmbeddingsAbstract: Large language models (LLMs) often concentrate their attention on a small set of tokens—referred to as attention sinks. Common examples include the first token, a promptindependent sink, and punctuation tokens, which are prompt-dependent. Although these tokens often lack inherent semantic meaning, their presence is critical for model performance, particularly under model compression and KV-caching. Yet, the function, semantic role, and origin of attention sinks—especially those beyond the first token—remain poorly understood.In this talk, I’ll present a comprehensive investigation revealing that attention sinks catch a sequence of tokens, tag them with a shared perturbation, and release them back into the residual stream, where they are later retrieved based on the tags they carry. Probing experiments show that these tags encode semantically meaningful information, such as the truth of a statement.This mechanism persists in models with query-key normalization—where prompt-dependent, non-BOS sinks have become more common—and DeepSeek-distilled models, where it spans more heads and accounts for greater variance in the embeddings. To support future theoretical work, we introduce a minimal task that is solvable via the catch, tag, release mechanism, and in which the mechanism naturally emerges through training.Biography: Vardan Papyan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed with the Department of Computer Science. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Department of Statistics at Stanford University, under the guidance of David Donoho, and his PhD at the Department of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Michael Elad.

The Mobility Forum with Prof. Jinhua Zhao showcases transportation research and innovation across the globe. The Forum is online and open to the public.

The convergence of sensors, spatial interfaces, and large visual-language AI models are transforming how we perceive, understand, and act in the physical world. Unlike traditional computing paradigms, embodied systems share our viewpoint and real-time context - enabling seamless spatial interaction. In this talk, I present three themes from our research on the future of Physical AI—where human experience, spatial computing, and intelligent systems converge to augment physical understanding and action.First, I will discuss our work on authoring environments that empower non-programmers to easily create immersive extended-reality applications. I will provide examples from hands-on training, production, and education to show how this works. Our system, which we call agentAR, enables subject-matter experts to author spatial learning experiences using both voice and gesture that help novices create augmented reality (AR) applications at ease and scale. Second, I will highlight our advances in AI design generation that take in human input and generate designs in real time. Our platform, designfromX, integrates vision and language models to convert verbal prompts and sketches into 3D designs, allowing humans and AI to co-create 3D design models. Third, I will present applications of embodied Physical AI in task performance and skill augmentation. Our avaTTar system is an extended reality table tennis-playing coach that fuses immersive visual feedback, and coaching intelligence. Building on avaTTar I will present a table-tennis-playing humanoid, offering a glimpse into the future of embodied AI. I will end by discussing visuo-haptic interfaces and smart physical tools to train workers in hands-on manufacturing settings.Together, these systems point to a future where Physical AI enhances how we design, train, and learn—expanding human potential across engineering, production, sports, and beyond. By bridging immersive interfaces and embodied intelligence, we aim to shape a new class of accessible, real-time, and spatially aware engineering systems.Biography: Karthik Ramani is the Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, with additional appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a courtesy role in the College of Education. He leads the Convergence Design Lab, where his research brings AI into the physical world by blending human-centered AI with spatial intelligence to create immersive, real-time solutions for design, manufacturing, sports training, surgery, and hands-on learning. His work spans augmented spatial interactions, symbiotic human-AI collaboration, computational design thinking and prototyping, and scalable upskilling platforms for production. Using the lens of Physical AI, he develops systems that perceive, understand, and act in real environments—extending human capacity through embodied and intuitive interfaces.He has recently published in top-tier venues across computer vision (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV), human-computer interaction (ACM CHI, UIST), and AI (NIPS, ICLR), in addition to leading engineering design journals. He co-founded VizSeek, the world’s first commercial shape-based search engine for mechanical parts, and ZeroUI, a CES-awarded robotics startup. His educational innovations include Purdue’s Toy Design and Product-Process-Business Model Design courses. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University and Oxford University and a research fellow at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC). He earned his B.Tech from IIT Madras, M.S. from The Ohio State University, and Ph.D. from Stanford—all in Mechanical Engineering. He currently also serves as coach of Purdue’s Table Tennis team, where research meets passion— in the emerging domain of Athletic AI.

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

Time: 5:00 PMLocation: Cambridge, MA

Bhagavad Gita Fall Lecture SeriesJoin HG Sadananda Dasa, MIT Vaishnava Hindu Chaplain, for a weekly journey into the timeless wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita. Explore profound questions about identity, purpose, karma, yoga, love, and selfless service, and discover practical insights for living a meaningful and spiritually grounded life. Each session combines reflection, discussion, and practical tools for self-realization.RSVP: tinyurl.com/mitgita25