Michael Sipser, the Barton L. Weller Professor of Mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics since 2004, has been named dean of the School of Science. Sipser has served as the school's interim dean since December, when he was chosen to replace Marc Kastner, the Donner Professor of Physics; in November, President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate Kastner to head the Department of Energy's Office of Science. "In 10 years as head of MIT's Department of Mathematics, Mike Sipser sustained its extraordinary stature while building a warm sense of community," MIT President L. Rafael Reif says. "His integrity, fairness, and patience will serve him very well in the role of dean. And as the School of Science faces difficult trends in federal funding, I believe Mike's gift for explaining complex scientific concepts will be a tremendous asset in Washington."

The annual MIT IDEAS Global Challenge awards ceremony awarded $79,500 on Monday night to 13 student-led teams to further develop inventions and ideas intended to solve pressing environmental and health challenges in developing countries. "Today marks an important opportunity for emerging entrepreneurs to take a big leap forward in their journey to improve the quality of life in communities around the world," Keely Swan, the Public Service Center's IDEAS Global Challenge program administrator, said in her welcoming remarks. Launched and run by MIT students, the winning ventures took home prizes of $10,000, $7,500, $5,000, and $1,500, to further support prototyping and field-testing, among other things. CleanData-CleanWater, a $10,000 winner last night, plans to use its earnings to manufacture 1,000 of its sensors, which gather previously unavailable data on water filter usage in developing countries. The sensors fit on a filter's tap and track how long the tap stays up or down, measuring the frequency and duration of use. The company plans to integrate the sensors into a new line of ceramic pot water filters being installed across Ghana by the company Pure Home Water, a previous IDEAS winner.

When the MIT Big Data Challenge asked, "What can you learn from data about 2.3 million taxi rides?" graduate students in professor Marta González's research lab had some answers. Based on their experience writing machine-learning algorithms that find meaningful patterns in very large data sets, and on their skill applying those patterns to understand how people use transportation in urban areas, the students were able to predict the number of taxi pickups that had occurred in 700 time intervals at 36 locations in the Boston area. Their predictions were the best in the competition, earning them the number one spot and $4,000 in prize money. The scientific visualization of the data prepared by one team member garnered a second-place prize and an additional $1,000. The awards were announced mid-March.

Faculty, students, and industry representatives packed MIT's Grier Room on Thursday, Dec. 4, to learn about new research in robotics, machine learning, wireless power transfer, synthetic biology, and more -- all being conducted by undergraduates through the groundbreaking SuperUROP program within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). "My feeling is some of this work is as good as master's-quality research. It's very good stuff," said Vincent Chan, the Joan and Irwin M. Jacobs Professor of Electrical Engineering and Aeronautics and Astronautics, who is advising two SuperUROP students this year. "We are creating a community of scholars. As they are exposed to the breadth of research in EECS, their excitement and enthusiasm to engage in research and innovation is contagious," said Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering and EECS department head, who launched the year-long SuperUROP research program in 2012 to expand the experience familiar to many through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

This week a team featuring multiple Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers took home the grand prize in an international competition centered on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Members of CSAIL's Marine Robotics Group joined forces with more than 20 other researchers from MIT and Olin College as one of 15 teams competing in the Maritime RobotX Challenge, which took place Oct. 20-26 in Marina Bay, Singapore. Each research group spent the past year developing sensors, computers, and software for the "WAM-V," a self-driving propeller-motored boat that resembles an oversized jet-ski. For the competition, teams traversed a special course to complete tasks that demonstrated motion-planning, control, and autonomy, including avoidance and detection of obstacles, identifying targets, and searching underwater for acoustic sources. MIT-Olin outperformed other universities from Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States, earning the $24,000 grand prize -- and a not-insignificant amount of international respect.

The late professor Seth Teller created 6.811 (Principles and Practices in Assistive Technologies, or PPAT) in the fall of 2011. Through his extensive experience developing assistive technologies (AT) at MIT, his compassion for making technology available to all, and his innovative approach and drive to build this class, student interest in PPAT and AT has grown steadily since. Following Teller's untimely death on July 1 this year, a group of former PPAT and AT students including his graduate student William Li SM '12, who TA'd the inaugural PPAT offering; Grace Teo PhD '14, a former student and member of the MIT Assistive Technology Club; and a core group of students who took the class in 2013 have formed a team to continue Teller's legacy through both the coninuation of PPAT and an outgrowth known as "AT Hack," a one-day workshop launched in spring 2014. Li and Teo, who will co-instruct this year's class, and three other members of the team will work with Professor Rob Miller, MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellow, member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and co-education officer of the Department of Electrocal Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Every year since the inaugural offering of PPAT, Miller had worked with Teller to help develop and teach the course.

For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to design computer networks that can mimic visual skills such as recognizing objects, which the human brain does very accurately and quickly. Until now, no computer model has been able to match the primate brain at visual object recognition during a brief glance. However, a new study from MIT neuroscientists has found that one of the latest generation of these so-called "deep neural networks" matches the primate brain. Because these networks are based on neuroscientists' current understanding of how the brain performs object recognition, the success of the latest networks suggest that neuroscientists have a fairly accurate grasp of how object recognition works, says James DiCarlo, a professor of neuroscience and head of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the senior author of a paper describing the study in the Dec. 18 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology. "The fact that the models predict the neural responses and the distances of objects in neural population space shows that these models encapsulate our current best understanding as to what is going on in this previously mysterious portion of the brain," says DiCarlo, who is also a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Researchers in Indiana University's Knowledge Acquisition and Projection Lab -- part of Pervasive Technology Labs -- along with computer scientists from the IU School of Informatics, have completed a project for the U.S. Navy in which they developed key components of the Navy's maintenance Knowledge Projection System. This project, a three-year joint undertaking with Crane Naval Surface Warfare Division and Purdue University, was aimed at developing next-generation diagnostics and maintenance capabilities for shipboard systems. "The need for tele-maintenance and distance support technologies for today's battleships, aircraft carriers and submarines is compelling," said Donald F. (Rick) McMullen, director of the Knowledge Acquisition and Projection Lab (KAPLab). McMullen, along with IU Professor of Computer Science David Leake, served as principal investigator for the KPS project. "The current generation of naval vessels is more complex than ever, and correcting problems with shipboard systems is frequently a team effort involving both ship- and shore-based personnel. In the current environment, distance support is critical to maintaining operational preparedness," McMullen said.

Robert Wilensky, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the campus's first faculty members in artificial intelligence when the field was just taking off, has died at age 61. He died at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland on Friday, March 15, of a bacterial infection. Wilensky's career at UC Berkeley spanned nearly 30 years, beginning in 1978 when he joined the faculty in computer science. He later was appointed a professor at the School of Information and Management Sciences (now the School of Information, or I School), which he helped form. His many research interests included the role of memory processes in natural language processing, language analysis and production and artificial intelligence in programming languages.

Computer scientist and AI pioneer EDWARD A. FEIGENBAUM has partnered with Stanford Libraries to make his personal papers available online, including more than 16,500 notes, scientific development documents, correspondence, Artificial Intelligence Lab memos, audio tapes and videos. Starting with the dawn of artificial intelligence research and computer science in 1956, the Edward A. Feigenbaum Papers allows users to explore a pivotal time in AI history by accessing documents from Feigenbaum's distinguished career as a scientist, book author, department chairman, government adviser and chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force. Feigenbaum joined the Stanford computer science faculty in 1965 as one of its founding members. That same year, he and Professor JOSHUA LEDERBERG, who had won a Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in 1958, before coming to Stanford, started the DENDRAL project, the world's first expert system. DENDRAL's groundbreaking work moved artificial intelligence out of the laboratory and into the structure of countless software applications.