Deep learning is advancing at lightning speed, and Alexander Amini '17 and Ava Soleimany '16 want to make sure they have your attention as they dive deep on the math behind the algorithms and the ways that deep learning is transforming daily life. Last year, their blockbuster course, 6.S191 (Introduction to Deep Learning) opened with a fake video welcome from former President Barack Obama. This year, the pair delivered their lectures "live" from Stata Center -- after taping them weeks in advance from their kitchen, outfitted for the occasion with studio lights, a podium, and a green screen for projecting the blackboard in Kirsch Auditorium on their Zoom backgrounds. "It's hard for students to stay engaged when they're looking at a static image of an instructor," says Amini. "We wanted to recreate the dynamic of a real classroom." Amini is a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Soleimany a graduate student at MIT and Harvard University.

Gaby Ecanow loves listening to music, but never considered writing her own until taking 6.S191 (Introduction to Deep Learning). By her second class, the second-year MIT student had composed an original Irish folk song with the help of a recurrent neural network, and was considering how to adapt the model to create her own Louis the Child-inspired dance beats. "It was cool," she says. "It didn't sound at all like a machine had made it." This year, 6.S191 kicked off as usual, with students spilling into the aisles of Stata Center's Kirsch Auditorium during Independent Activities Period (IAP).

As more than 90 students in MIT's SuperUROP Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunites Program flowed into a year-end certificates presentation event on May 7 at the Media Lab Skyline Room, they looked quite ready to celebrate a year of work on intense research collaborations with faculty advisors, supported as by the generous backing of industry and private sponsors. Senior Ava Soleimany says she has gained a "much-nuanced understanding of what exactly research involves." With an interest in the computational aspects of synthetic biology and its medical applications, Soleimany applied to be a SuperUROP in spring 2014 in Professor Timothy Lu's Synthetic Biology Group. She was able to extend her existing Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project into a SuperUROP. "It allowed me to hit the ground running in the fall while many of my peers were still sorting out the details of their projects," she notes.