Writing Together Online offers structured time to help you spring into writing and stay focused this semester. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects. For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends.Register for Spring 2025 Writing Challenge 1Choose those sessions that you want to attend during Challenge 1: February 10th through March 21stMondays 9:00–10:30amTuesdays 8–9:30am and 9:30–11amWednesdays 9:00–10:30amThursdays 8–9:30am and 9:30–11amFridays 8–9:30am and 9:30–11amMIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a raffle of three $25 Amazon gift cards. The raffle will take place on Friday, March 21st. The more you participate, the more times you will be entered into the raffle of prizes.For more information and to register, check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with peers and friends.The funding support for this program comes from the Office of Graduate Education

Writing Together Online offers structured time to help you spring into writing and stay focused this semester. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects. For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends.Register for Spring 2025 Writing Challenge 1Choose those sessions that you want to attend during Challenge 1: February 10th through March 21stMondays 9:00–10:30amTuesdays 8–9:30am and 9:30–11amWednesdays 9:00–10:30amThursdays 8–9:30am and 9:30–11amFridays 8–9:30am and 9:30–11amMIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a raffle of three $25 Amazon gift cards. The raffle will take place on Friday, March 21st. The more you participate, the more times you will be entered into the raffle of prizes.For more information and to register, check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with peers and friends.The funding support for this program comes from the Office of Graduate Education

The next session on February 4th will be held on Zoom.Meet other expecting and first time parents of infants under one year to connect, share information, and support each other. Bring your concerns, questions, and experiences to the group. And of course, your babies are welcome! This peer led group is organized by MS&PC members Kathrin and Maria.Contact Kathrin hauserkathrin1994@gmail.com or Maria maria.korompili24@gmail.com for more information.

Stop by our Lab Safety Awareness - EHS Table for goodies, games, and giveaways.Lab Safety Awareness Week is to recognize the successes of laboratory health and safety programs and to offer information and ideas about how to keep our faculty, staff, and students safe.

Info Session Are you considering a career in healthcare? Do you want to learn more about the process of working through a patient case and considerations for taking a history, choosing which diagnostics to pursue, and working through next steps with a patient? Come to this workshop to work through a veterinary clinical case together. This CAPD event is open to MIT undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and alumni.

Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98651233056Speaker: Guy GazivAffiliation: DiCarlo LabTitle: Robustified ANNs Reveal Wormholes Between Human Category PerceptsAbstract:The visual object category reports of artificial neural networks (ANNs) are notoriously sensitive to tiny, adversarial image perturbations. Because human category reports (aka human percepts) are thought to be insensitive to those same small-norm perturbations — and locally stable in general — this argues that ANNs are incomplete scientific models of human visual perception. Consistent with this, we show that when small-norm image perturbations are generated by standard ANN models, human object category percepts are indeed highly stable. However, in this very same "human-presumed-stable" regime, we find that robustified ANNs reliably discover low-norm image perturbations that strongly disrupt human percepts. These previously undetectable human perceptual disruptions are massive in amplitude, approaching the same level of sensitivity seen in robustified ANNs. Further, we show that robustified ANNs support precise perceptual state interventions: they guide the construction of low-norm image perturbations that strongly alter human category percepts toward specific prescribed percepts. These observations suggest that for arbitrary starting points in image space, there exists a set of nearby "wormholes", each leading the subject from their current category perceptual state into a semantically very different state. Moreover, contemporary ANN models of biological visual processing are now accurate enough to consistently guide us to those portals.

It's a good time to get creative and finish that project! The Fiber Crafts Group offers the space to craft online with friends. Meetings will be held via Zoom. Feel free to sign in at any time over the session, and stay for as long as you like. For a Zoom invite, please email Claudia James (nonnajames@gmail.com) or Olimpia Caceres-Brown (olimpia@mit.edu)

Want to get exercise mid-day but don’t want to go outside? Join the tunnel walk for a 30-minute walk led by a volunteer through MIT’s famous tunnel system. This walk may include stairs/inclines. Wear comfortable shoes. Free.Location details: Meet in the atrium by the staircase. Location photo below.Tunnel Walk Leaders will have a white flag they will raise at the meeting spot for you to find them.Prize Drawing: Attend a walk and scan a QR code from the walk leaders to be entered into a drawing for a getfit 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.

MIT Free English Class is for international students, sholars, spouses. Twenty seven years ago we created a community to welcome the nations to MIT and assist with language and friendship. Join our Tuesday/Thursday conversation classes around tables inside W11-190.

The Chaplains invite you to take a brief pause for refreshments and conversation as you cross campus this month. Find us in the Stata Street on Tuesday afternoons. Look for the rocking chairs!

"Governing Local Bureaucracy in a Centralized State" | Zhaotian Luo (Chicago)

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: Guillermo Peñafort Sanchis (University of Valencia)Title: Open problems about deformations of singular holomorphic map germsAbstract:The theory of deformations of germs of holomorphic mappings and the theory of deformations of germs of complex hypersurfaces share many features, which become apparent once one knows how to translate from one to the other. But, for any result about hypersurfaces, the corresponding result about mappings tends to be much harder to prove. In this talk we will discuss open problems about singular mappings, based on the following known results about isolated hypersurface singularities:· The Milnor number is greater than or equal to the Tjurina number and their quotient cannot exceed the dimension of the ambient space.· If two hypersurfaces have the same topological type, then their Milnor numbers are equal.· Singularities cannot be split in two without giving rise to non-trivial homology.

Speakers: Alex Cohen (MIT)Title: Ruling out periodicity in quantum chaosAbstract: A central question in quantum chaos is to understand the behavior of high-frequency Laplace eigenfunctions on hyperbolic manifolds. Quantum cat maps are a model system that behave hyperbolic manifolds: the known tools apply equally well to both systems. However, for special parameter choices quantum cat maps exhibit a strange periodicity, resulting in concentration of eigenfunctions—behavior not expected for eigenfunctions on hyperbolic manifolds. We discuss new work distinguishing these two systems. The key ingredient is an uncertainty principle that distinguishes the Fourier transform from a modified Fourier transform with nonlinear phase function.Joint with Semyon Dyatlov.

Speaker: Joanna Wysocka, StanfordHost: Yadira Soto Feliciano & Eliezer CaloTitle: "Human development and evolution through the lens of gene regulation." The Mayer LectureThe Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

Speaker: Samuel Mundy (Princeton University)Title: Vanishing of Selmer groups for Siegel modular formsAbstract:Let $\pi$ be a cuspidal automorphic representation of $Sp_{2n}$ over $\mathbb{Q}$ which is holomorphic discrete series at infinity, and $\chi$ a Dirichlet character. Then one can attach to $\pi$ an orthogonal $p$-adic Galois representation $ho$ of dimension $2n+1$. Assume $ho$ is irreducible, that $\pi$ is ordinary at $p$, and that $p$ does not divide the conductor of $\chi$. I will describe work in progress which aims to prove that the Bloch--Kato Selmer group attached to $ho\otimes\chi$ vanishes, under some mild ramification assumptions on $\pi$; this is what is predicted by the Bloch--Kato conjectures.The proof uses "ramified Eisenstein congruences" by constructing $p$-adic families of Siegel cusp forms degenerating to Klingen Eisenstein series of nonclassical weight, and using these families to construct ramified Galois cohomology classes for the Tate dual of $ho\otimes\chi$.

Dr. Thomas Serre, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown University's Carney Center for Computational Brain Science, to speak as part of the Quest for Intelligence and CBMM seminar series.Title: Aligning deep networks with human vision will require novel neural architectures, data diets and training algorithmsAbstract: Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been mainly driven by the rapid scaling of deep neural networks (DNNs), which now contain unprecedented numbers of learnable parameters and are trained on massive datasets, covering large portions of the internet. This scaling has enabled DNNs to develop visual competencies that approach human levels. However, even the most sophisticated DNNs still exhibit strange, inscrutable failures that diverge markedly from human-like behavior—a misalignment that seems to worsen as models grow in scale.In this talk, I will discuss recent work from our group addressing this misalignment via the development of DNNs that mimic human perception by incorporating computational, algorithmic, and representational principles fundamental to natural intelligence. First, I will review our ongoing efforts in characterizing human visual strategies in image categorization tasks and contrasting these strategies with modern deep nets. I will present initial results suggesting we must explore novel data regimens and training algorithms for deep nets to learn more human-like visual representations. Second, I will show results suggesting that neural architectures inspired by cortex-like recurrent neural circuits offer a compelling alternative to the prevailing transformers, particularly for tasks requiring visual reasoning beyond simple categorization.

“The Market Effects of Algorithms” | Lindsey Raymond (Microsoft Research)

A vinyl listening session hosted by Grammy Award-Winner Miguel Zenón and Lewis Music Library Department Head Avery Boddie.This event will introduce listeners to leading pioneers and musicians of jazz as well as the most influential albums of the genre spanning the past 100 years. Listeners will learn the societal influences and historical contexts which influenced each album. Several key artists covering different time periods will be examined, as will their unique musical styles, creative practices, and lasting contributions to the genre.

Writing a journal article can be a daunting task, characterized by frustration instead of progress. This four-part workshop series will breakdown the task of writing an empirical journal article into manageable pieces so that you can move your project forward. Led by WCC lecturer Adrienne Tierney, Ed.D, we will discuss how to approach each section and how to use writing as a problem-solving tool in creating a meaningful paper that conveys your research clearly and effectively. We encourage you to attend all sessions of the series, but you are also welcome to sign up for separate sessions.Part 1. Getting Started: Creating a Plan and Drafting an IntroductionTuesday, February 11th, 4:00-5:30pmPart 2. Getting to the Data: Methods and ResultsTuesday, February 18th, 4:00-5:30pmPart 3. Interpreting Your Findings: DiscussionTuesday, February 25th, 4:00-5:30pmPart 4. From Paper to Publication: Revision and SubmissionTuesday, March 4th, 4:00-5:30pm

Luminita Stevens (Univ. of Maryland)

For researchers interested in commercializing their new technology:● Learn what I-Corps is all about and what to expect in the program ● Explore the benefits of participating in our I-Corps short course ● What will the next steps be toward a potential $2MM in non-dilutive funding supportThere will be an opportunity for Q&A at the end of the session.

Have you secured a summer experience, but find it underpaid? Curious about how to fund it? Join this session to explore resources available at MIT, including the Career Exploration Fellowship, designed to support your summer plans. You'll also receive tips on how to craft a strong application for funding opportunities.This CAPD event is open to all MIT undergraduates.

Join us for a compelling discussion on the evolving dynamics of US-China science cooperation, highlighting the role of scientists at the intersection of innovation and geopolitics. As the new Trump administration shapes its China policies, how is the United States navigating scientific collaboration with China? What are the implications for Chinese American and China-focused scientists? Two Chinese American MIT faculty members and the Director of the MIT Washington Office will share their insights on the opportunities and challenges of advancing scientific progress in the context of an increasingly complex and contested US-China relationship.Light snacks will be provided. Please RSVP here.Speakers:Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan; Faculty Director MIT-China ProgramGang Chen, Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering, MechE; Director, Pappalardo Micro and Nano Engineering LaboratoriesDavid Goldston, Director, MIT Washington OfficeModerator:Mihaela Papa, Director of Research and Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for International StudiesContact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming CIS Global Research & Policy Seminars.

This yoga practice provides the opportunity to relax and de-stress as well as to stretch, strengthen, and balance your body. The practice begins with a meditative centering followed by warm-ups, a posture flow, and a restful final relaxation. We conclude with a closing and some time for connecting with your fellow yogis.The yoga postures are led at a moderate intensity. Lower intensity modifications are always offered and there is absolutely no obligation to do any posture. The goal is to make the class accessible to beginners as well as experienced practitioners. Listening to your body is the key to safety, especially in this online format.Registration is required on our wellness class website. If you do not already have an account on this website, you'll need to create one. This is fee-based class and open to the entire MIT community.

The MIT wrestling club holds practices in the du Pont Wrestling Room on weeknights 5:30-7pm. All levels of experience welcome! Whether you're looking to learn how to grapple or just want to get in a good workout, wrestling practice is a good time to learn technique, get in some live goes, and have fun with a great group of people.Current schedule is: structured practice MTRF, open mats W, and technique sessions 9-10:30am on Saturday. For more information, contact wrestling-officers@mit.edu.

Join MIT Spouses & Partners Connect for a fun-filled evening on the ice! Enjoy free admission and skate rentals, plus light refreshments. Bring your own skates if you have them. A valid MIT ID is required for free skate rental. Children are welcome. The registration is here.This event is exclusively for MIT Spouses & Partners Connect members and their families.

"Do you ever feel that life holds a deeper meaning beyond what you currently understand? The truth is profound—there are countless mysteries of existence, divinity, and the self that lie beyond our awareness. There is so much we don’t know, and even more that we don’t realize we don’t know."Join us on this exciting journey of Discover Your Self to explore the unknown territories of life and delve into the science of spirituality. This course, based on the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, will equip you with proven methods to achieve true inner joy and answer your deepest questions about life's higher principles. This Course explains Proven methods to attain the true inner joy of heart and gives answers to all the Inquiries about Higher Principles in life like the pathway for unlimited and everlasting happiness from the eyes of scriptures like Bhagavad Gita in a scientific perspective.Salient Features:Discover the Game of LifeDiscover Inner SelfDiscover The Ultimate GeniusDiscover Manual of LifeDiscover Lasting SolutionDiscover Sublime Joy Through SoundDiscover The Real Eternal LoveDiscover The Happy PlanetYou are invited to join us every Tuesday 6:00-7:00 pm. To your pleasure we have free delicious sattvik vegetarian dinner is available after every session.Event details:6:00 pm-6:10 pm: Mantra Meditation and kirtan6:10 pm-6:50 pm: : Session7:00pm : Dinner along with Q&A.Venue: MIT Room 56-180, 32 Vasaar Steeet, Cambridge MA Kindly RSVP here https://forms.gle/DEXUz6ig6dJZoU1k7Regards, MIT Vedic Vision Forum

Join us for a conversation with Harvard University Professor Cass Sunstein and Knight Science Journalism Fellow Emily Foxhall on the social cost of carbon.If you're injuring someone, you should stop -- and pay for the damages you've caused. Why does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status quo thinking on the ethics of climate change, renowned author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what's at stake and lays out the moral imperative: When it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when or where they live -- which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obligated to help future generations and people in poor nations that are particularly vulnerable.Copies of Climate Justice will be available for purchase onsite from the MIT Press Bookstore.