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 three-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion is coming up. Are you wondering how to help Ukraine? Stop by to learn about the ways you can get involved. There will be information about MISTI Ukraine opportunities and the GMAF Scholar program. Listen to invited speakers talk about their work to support Ukraine and research that still needs to be done. There will be a workshop where you can learn to cross-stitch some Ukrainian patterns. We will also have a fundraiser, selling a handmade poetry book, Ukrainian cookbook, and borshch and cake. All proceeds will go to the Mriya Foundation to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Enjoy a warm drink, connect with old friends, and meet new ones. Please bring a snack to share (store bought or homemade).Let's talk about whatever is on your mind. Hosted MS&PC volunteers. Babies & children are welcome.Simply send an email to spousesandpartners@mit.edu and let us know that you would like to join us.ONLY FOR SPOUSES, PARTNERS, AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS.

Special Seminar with Jacob Zavatone-VethDate: Monday, February 24, 2025Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 amLocation: McGovern Seminar Room (46-3189)Title: Mechanistic identifiability in neural circuitsAbstract: One of the central goals of neuroscience is to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the dynamics of neural circuits give rise to their observed function. A popular approach towards this end is to train recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to reproduce experimental recordings of neural activity. These trained RNNs are then treated as surrogate models of biological neural circuits, whose properties can be dissected via dynamical systems analysis. How reliable are the mechanistic insights derived from this procedure? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent efforts to disentangle when computational mechanisms are identifiable through data-driven modeling. Focusing on the simple setting of integrator circuits, I will show how mismatches can arise both due to explicit constraints imposed by architectural choices, and due to more subtle inductive biases of learning in recurrent networks. Looking to the future, I will discuss ongoing work on model evaluation procedures that focus on mechanistic recovery.Bio: Jacob Zavatone-Veth is a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. His research is broadly focused on the theory of neural computation, with particular emphasis on how representations and dynamics are learned. He was first introduced to neuroscience during his undergraduate work in physics at Yale, where he studied visual motion detection and locomotor coordination in fruit flies with Damon Clark. He then came to Harvard for his Ph.D.; his doctoral work with Cengiz Pehlevan applied tools from statistical physics to investigate the structure of learned representations in natural and artificial neural networks. He is a recipient of a 2024 NIH Director's Early Independence Award, and of the 2024 American Physical Society Dissertation Award in Statistical and Nonlinear Physic

According to UN estimates, over 122 million people are displaced due to conflict, persecution, and climate change. Many more remain unaccounted for and are broadly categorized as migrants or stateless persons. These communities face complex healthcare challenges owing to changing and unstable environments and new diseases. Professor Zaman will discuss the role technology and basic science in improving their healthcare access, along with the ethical challenges these approaches present.Muhammad Zaman is the HHMI Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. He is the author of We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), four other books, and over 130 peer-reviewed research articles on innovation, refugee health, and global health. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 for his work on antibiotic resistance in refugee camps and was previously a postdoctoral fellow in cancer research at MIT.Lunch will be available at 11:45am. Please RSVP here.Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming CIS Global Research & Policy Seminars.

Join us on Monday, February 24, 2025, at 12 pm in the Nexus, Hayden Library for a talk led by Zeynep Tufekci, Turkish-American sociologist and Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University.What if the Real Threat is Artificial Good-Enough Intelligence?Are we having the wrong nightmares about AI? Many worry that “artificial general intelligence” — AGI, or when machine intelligence matches or exceeds that of humans — poses a severe threat. These newly-superintelligent machines could turn on their creators, we’ve been warned, like Skynet in the apocalyptic movie Terminator.But many early predictions — fears and hopes — about how new technologies will change the world turn out to be false or misleading. Meanwhile, significant risks that arise simply from increased speed, expanded scale or lower costs that technology enables are often overlooked.A new technology does not have to outperform humans, or even be singularly sensational compared to previous technologies, to fuel extreme turbulence and instability, usually in an unforeseen manner. Cars weren’t so transformative simply because they exceeded the speed benchmark set by horses, nor were they horseless carriages.In this talk, Tufekci will examine the disruptive and even potentially catastrophic risks from Artificial Good-Enough Intelligence — AI that can do things not necessarily as well as humans but just good enough to be useful while being faster, cheaper and deployable at scale, and in ways that go beyond current concerns such as employment effects, productivity or bias.