A celebration of creativity and community at MITArtfinity is a new festival of the arts at MIT featuring 80 free performing and visual arts events, celebrating creativity and community at the Institute. Artfinity launches with the opening of the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building on February 15, 2025, continues with a concentration of events February 28-March 16, and culminates with the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts public lecture by 2025 recipient artist and designer Es Devlin on May 1, 2025, and a concert by Grammy-winning rapper and Visiting Professor Lupe Fiasco on May 2, 2025. Artfinity embodies MIT’s commitment to creativity, community, and the intersection of art, science and technology. We invite you to join us in this celebration, explore the diverse events, and experience the innovative spirit that defines the arts at MIT.About the Artists Artfinity features the innovative work of MIT faculty, students, staff, and alumni, alongside guest artists from the Greater Boston area and beyond.About the Activities & Events All 80 events are open to the public, including dozens of concerts and performances plus an array of visual arts such as projections, films, installations, exhibitions, and augmented reality experiences, as well as lectures and workshops for attendees to participate in. With a wide range of visual and performing arts events open to all, Artfinity embodies MIT’s commitment to the arts and the intersection of art, science, and technology.About the Presenters Artfinity is an institute-sponsored event organized by the Office of the Arts at MIT with faculty leads Institute Professor of Music Marcus Thompson and Professor of Art, Culture and Technology Azra Akšamija. Departments, labs, centers, and student groups across MIT are presenting partners.Visit arts.mit.edu for more information about the arts at MIT.

Want to get exercise at the start of the 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. [As of Feb 12, this calendar is defaulting to the year 1899. Click "today" to be brought to the current week.]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.

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