When she was an MIT undergraduate studying electrical engineering, Jeannette Wing ’78, SM ’79, PhD ’83 took a required computer science class and began thinking about changing her major. But before making the decision, she called her father, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, to ask one big question: Is computer science just a fad? “I literally remember asking him that question,” Wing said, drawing chuckles from an audience of MIT students and faculty. Wing’s father assured her that computer science was here to stay. “So I switched,” said Wing, who is herself now the Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and professor of computer science at Columbia. “And I’ve never looked back.” Patti Maes’ career path also began in college, when she couldn’t decide between two majors. Because of an economic downturn at the time, she also worried about the employment prospects in both fields. “I got interested in computer science as a way of [not] choosing between biology and architecture” — and ensuring that she could find a job after graduation, she said. Later, as a visiting professor and research scientist at MIT, Maes began working with robots and artificial intelligence (AI), but eventually moved to the MIT Media Lab, where she is now a professor of media arts and sciences. She said she’s more interesting in human intelligence, focusing on, for instance, how to help people improve their memories, become more creative, and listen better — “these soft skills that we really desperately need to do well in life.”...

Many MIT students, like their beaver mascot, are well-known for engineering skills, industrious habits, and for creating some amazing things late into the night. So, an ambitious project to build a 1:1 scale replica of MIT in Minecraft may come as no surprise. “As MIT students normally are nocturnal people anyway, there’s no doubt that we would apply our normal schoolwork habits to a light-hearted project like this,” says Shayna Ahteck, a first-year student involved with building and community outreach for the initiative. With the Covid-19 pandemic scattering students around the globe, Minecraft — a sandbox style game akin to digital LEGO — has served as a creative and cathartic outlet for some students while they are physically away from campus, while also providing the entire community with some sense of stability. “Getting back to the basic structure of what campus looks like, while not a replacement for the feeling that I got from people and everything, it reminds me of all the times that we had, as well as processing some of my own grief from leaving campus,” says Ahteck....

Getting robots to do things isn’t easy: Usually, scientists have to either explicitly program them or get them to understand how humans communicate via language. But what if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves? A new system spearheaded by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to do exactly that, allowing users to instantly correct robot mistakes with nothing more than brain signals and the flick of a finger. Building off the team’s past work focused on simple binary-choice activities, the new work expands the scope to multiple-choice tasks, opening up new possibilities for how human workers could manage teams of robots. By monitoring brain activity, the system can detect in real-time if a person notices an error as a robot does a task. Using an interface that measures muscle activity, the person can then make hand gestures to scroll through and select the correct option for the robot to execute....