The School of Science announced that six of its faculty members have been appointed to named professorships this fall semester. Gloria Choi studies how the brain learns to recognize olfactory stimuli and associate them with appropriate behavioral responses. Using mouse models, Choi works to anatomically and functionally map the circuitry that connects sensory representations to specific behavioral outcomes, and also investigates how learning transforms this circuitry and how the brain maintains behavioral plasticity so that responses to stimuli are context-dependent. Choi joined the MIT faculty in 2013 as an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a McGovern Investigator. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and her PhD from Caltech, where she studied with David Anderson.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif announced today a significant expansion of the Institute's programs in learning research and online and digital education -- from pre-kindergarten through residential higher education and lifelong learning -- that fulfills a number of recommendations made in 2014 by the Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education. Most notably, Reif announced the creation of the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili), to be led by Professor John Gabrieli, and a new effort to increase MIT's ability to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning by students from pre-kindergarten through high school (pK-12), to be led by Professor Angela Belcher. The announcement also included a program to support faculty innovations in MIT residential education and new work to enhance MIT's continuing education programs. In keeping with the high priority of these new efforts and of the entire field of digital learning, Professor Sanjay Sarma, now dean of digital learning, will oversee them in the newly created position of vice president for open learning, reporting directly to Reif. Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart, who will share responsibility with Sarma for several aspects of this work, predicts that the programs announced today will have "far-reaching and tremendous implications for education -- for MIT students as well as for students not at MIT."

Optimization problems are everywhere in engineering: Balancing design tradeoffs is an optimization problem, as are scheduling and logistical planning. The theory -- and sometimes the implementation -- of control systems relies heavily on optimization, and so does machine learning, which has been the basis of most recent advances in artificial intelligence. This week, at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, a trio of present and past MIT graduate students won a best-student-paper award for a new "cutting-plane" algorithm, a general-purpose algorithm for solving optimization problems. The algorithm improves on the running time of its most efficient predecessor, and the researchers offer some reason to think that they may have reached the theoretical limit. But they also present a new method for applying their general algorithm to specific problems, which yields huge efficiency gains -- several orders of magnitude.

D. Fox Harrell, associate professor of digital media with appointments in the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing program and in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has recently been awarded several grants to advance his research at the intersection of the social sciences and digital technology. These grants, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the MIT CSAIL Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) Alliance, and the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST), together amount to $1.35 million in support for Harrell's groundbreaking interdisciplinary research. Harrell's new set of complementary initiatives builds upon his NSF CAREER Grant research project, "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation," to delve more deeply into the dynamic relationship between virtual avatars and personal identities. He was able to push this work in innovative new directions while spending the 2014-15 year as a fellow at Stanford University in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (with the support of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication). "For five years I have been researching this intersection between human experiences and our identities as implemented across digital technologies such as video games and social media," Harrell says.

September 11 had quite a different meaning for me before it became 9/11. And early on that cool blue morning I took my daily run from our Chelsea apartment down the West Side Highway past the World Trade Center to South Ferry and back. I never thought much about the Twin Towers then, except sometimes to remember the convoluted history of how they got built in the first place, or to feel their overwhelming presence in what was then a low-rise part of Manhattan as I breezed past, with no sense of how gigantic their absence might become. At work later that morning, when the news came in, we first thought "accident." After all, in 1945 a B-25 bomber had crashed into the 79th floor of New York City's Empire State Building.

To that end, the Department of Defense wants to seed the oceans with robotic vehicles, leaving them on the seafloor until they're needed. In a time of crisis, a military commander would transmit a signal to the underwater vehicles, which would then float to the surface and either monitor the area, or launch a separate unmanned vehicle into the air to gather intelligence. At the end of the mission the vehicle could be picked up by a submarine or support ship. The system of robotic vehicles and their UAVs would be called Upward Falling Payload. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is asking private companies to come up with designs for the communications systems, the "risers" that will float the UAVs to the surface, the UAVs themselves and the equipment they would carry.

Rarely does a day go by without mention of a new kind of robot popping up in the science headlines. But if the robot revolution really does come to pass, the machines aren't likely to swoop down on us in some sudden and terrifying Instead, they'll rise up calmly from the weird places they've been secretly infiltrating. Here we take a look at some of the unexpected places where robots have already staked out positions. The Cooki prototype displayed at this year's Consumer Electronics Show is able to prepare an entire meal from ingredients loaded into side-mounted trays. Most public and university libraries now have self-checkout kiosks and other automated systems for checking out books.

The new restaurant in Kunshan follows in the tracks of this robotic eatery, which opened in the northeastern city of Harbin in 2012. Atlas resembles humanoid robots we know from fiction, such as The Terminator. It's more teatime than Terminator -- a restaurant in China is electrifying customers by using more than a dozen robots to cook and deliver food. Mechanical staff greet customers, deliver dishes to tables and even stir-fry meat and vegetables at the eatery in Kunshan, which opened last week. "My daughter asked me to invent a robot because she doesn't like doing housework," the restaurant's founder Song Yugang told AFP.

A Japanese robot-maker showed off suits that a wearer can control just by thinking, as it said it was linking up with an industrial city promoting innovation. Cyberdyne founder Yoshiyuki Sankai said he was allying with Kawasaki, a city south of Tokyo, to explore ways to expand real-life applications for his robo-suits, which are often used for physical therapy. "We want to make technology that actually helps people," Sankai, who is also a professor of engineering at the University of Tsukuba, northeast of Tokyo, said. Cyberdyne, based in Tsukuba, makes power-assisted robotic suits, limbs and joints that can help the elderly and disabled to get around or can help industrial workers to lift heavy objects. The machines detect weak electrical pulses that run through the skin when the wearer's brain sends the message to the limb to move.

Read about the world's tallest building, the longest bicycle, the most modern tractor and a discovered time capsule that cannot be opened until the year 2957. Shoe manufacturer New Balance is stepping onto the 3-D printing platform with a new running shoe that incorporates a 3-D printed midsole that can be customized to each runner. New Balance is making the shoe available for the first time in Boston in April, 2016 -- timed to coincide with the Boston Marathon. It's difficult to believe that with all of the unrest in Iraq, a company such as AMBS Architects would propose building a skyscraper to rival Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which stands 830-meters high. But here it is: the 1,152-meter-tall Bride's tower. The building is being suggested for Basra, located in the south of Iraq -- a rapidly growing center for business.