If a bulky electrical box has to be placed at the edge of a public park, what's the best way to conceal it so that it won't detract from its surroundings? At the conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June, researchers from MIT and several other institutions take a first stab at answering these types of questions, with a new algorithm that can analyze photos of a scene, taken from multiple perspectives, and produce a camouflage covering for an object placed within it. The researchers developed a range of candidate algorithms and tested them using Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing application, scoring them according to the amount of time volunteers took to locate camouflaged objects in synthetic images. Objects hidden by their best-performing algorithm took, on average, more than three seconds to find -- significantly longer than the casual glance the camouflage is intended to thwart. According to Andrew Owens, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and lead author on the new paper, the problem of disguising objects in a scene is, to some degree, the inverse of the problem of object detection, a major area of research in computer vision.

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.

If a robot was grading this article as if it were an essay on the SAT, the perfect opening line would go a little something like this: Computerized robotic technology has been shown to be a highly efficient device to grade standardized examinations, however, when put to the test the mechanized system is easy to thwart. That's according to The New York Times, who challenged recent findings that claimed there was little difference between human and robot graders. The Times had Les Perelman, a director of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and opponent of electronic grading, kick the tires on Education Testing Service's e-Rater, which the service says it uses in conjunction with human essay readers. Among other faults, Perelman found the e-Rater is not capable of telling truth from fiction, so there is little incentive for test takers to get their facts straight. He got the highest possible score.)

Three experimental robots, each about the size of a shoebox, are being used to search for victims in the mountain of rubble that was once the World Trade Center in New York City. Researcher Robin Murphy and three of her graduate students have been clambering over the jagged piles of debris powdered concrete and twisted steel with the camera-carrying robots, lowering them into voids that are inaccessible to people, dogs, and other cameras involved in the search for bodies. "So far the robots haven't found a survivor," said engineering professor Robin Murphy of the University of South Florida, who is developing the robots specifically for urban search and rescue missions. "We've only seen body parts and bloody splotches," said Murphy. "At this point we don't have much hope. We are trying to find remains so that they can be handled with dignity."

Even before the current war on terrorism, security checks at airports and in other places were often a problem for deaf people, who can't hear the buzz of metal detectors or the commands of security guards. Many deaf people are not fluent in English, so posted signs aren't always helpful. Using sign-language interpreters at every security station is not the answer, either, because of the cost and limited availability of trained personnel. In the near future, "Paula" could provide a solution to this communication barrier, as well as many others. Paula is a computer-generated synthetic interpreter developed by a team of faculty and students in the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems at DePaul University in Chicago.

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.

On Friday, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) hosted 150 local high school students for its second annual "Hour of Code" event, tied to the international initiative focused on getting kids interested in programming. Researchers showed off robots, 3-D-printing technology, and other projects to math and computer science students from schools throughout the greater Boston area, including Cambridge, Charlestown, Roxbury, and Somerville. The event also included a surprise video message from John Green, author of the bestselling young-adult novels-turned-movies "The Fault In Our Stars" and "Papertowns." Green commended the students on participating the event and elaborated on why coding is important. "I cannot emphasize enough how much I believe in learning computer science, not least because I am basically a first-grader when it comes to computer literacy," Green said.