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After spending many hours grinding through my work, theres nothing I find more refreshing than opening up my laptop and scrolling through Reddit in the evening. My 2022 Reddit Recap affirmed that I spent the most time scrolling through the Northeastern subreddit, which makes sense considering how much I use it to navigate my academic journey.

Besides all the sh*t posts and yet another entertaining complaint about finding rats in an apartment, I take advantage of the fact that many Northeastern students go on Reddit to describe their experiences there. Hence, when building my schedule or figuring out which professors best align with how I learn, I read through subreddit posts meticulously.

Even though I use Reddit to, supposedly, relieve my stress about the unknowns of my college career, I have come to a point where I got so caught up in the opinions of other students about various classes that I lost my sense of identity and confidence about the path I could pursue in college. I let my potential be defined by the experiences of people on a social media platform.

Particularly, when I was stressed about which major I wanted to pursue after deciding that a path toward the medical field would be too stressful, I decided to browse through Reddit to learn about peoples experiences with other majors at Northeastern. If youre an avid visitor of the Northeastern subreddit, you would know that there are countless posts about peoples frustrations with Northeasterns computer science classes. The idea of spending at least 10 hours of work on classes with unsupportive professors, combined with the fact that computer science did not come naturally to me in high school, made me immediately dismiss the major as an option.

I didnt even bother to talk to people in real life about their experiences with the major, let alone discuss the major with an academic advisor from Khoury College of Computer Sciences. I had let the fear I felt from seeing many people complain about Fundamentals of Computer Science 1, or Fundies, on Reddit prevent me from potentially pursuing the field. In high school, there was no subreddit to prevent me from taking four AP classes during my senior year. I had a slight glimmer of confidence to get me through that pursuit.

Looking back at my initial doubts about Fundies, I realize I shouldve been more open toward my friend from another school who affirmed I would be fine, considering my strong work ethic. I consulted with my friend, a computer science and behavioral neuroscience major, over the summer about what she thought about the Fundies posts on Reddit, and talking to her just reaffirmed the fact that people tend to only post online only if they have strong opinions.

It seems that people tend to post on Reddit, and even TRACE, another online resource I spend too much time stressing over, if they have extremely positive or (more likely) extremely negative experiences with a class or professor. Reddit and TRACE are double-edged swords. On one hand, they are accessible resources on which to gather up-to-date information about classes Im interested in from a large pool of students. On the other hand, the opinions contained in those resources are biased and seem to often come out of spitefulness.

As a data science and psychology combined major, I remember feeling distraught when I learned I had to take Discrete Structures. Discrete is another computer science class that gets complained about on Reddit. I mentally prepared myself to receive a bad grade in the class but found that I was able to be much more successful in the class than expected. I definitely do not think that Discrete is an easy class. Still, I found it manageable if youre willing to review the lecture videos as needed, go to office hours as early and as much as needed, attend recitations and generally just work hard and responsibly.

After completing Discrete, I truly started to contemplate what my life would have been like if I had chosen to become a computer science major instead. I adore data science, but sometimes I do wonder what it would have been like if I had been a computer science and music technology combined major instead.

Northeasterns Reddit community does have its empowering moments. About a month ago, a Northeastern student posted alleging the school had commented out code that would have enabled students to automatically donate their leftover meal swipes for a week. I also often see posts about people expressing mental health concerns that receive heartwarming and reassuring comments. And the infinite comedic posts complaining about the quality of Snells study environment always release any tensions I feel after a rough workday.

Social media sites such as Reddit can be fun and even uplifting, but its important to establish boundaries with them and not let them control the trajectory of your life.

Even though Im fortunate enough to be majoring in a field I can see myself enjoying in the future, I worry for other people who have the potential to excel at computer science, or other fields with a reputation for being difficult at Northeastern, but end up letting biased online opinions deteriorate their confidence.

Reddit and TRACE are accessible resources to gauge the difficulty of a class, but just because an overwhelming amount of students complain about a class does not mean you wont turn out fine. Northeastern is a school that encourages students to engage in exploratory learning, and I dont wish for peoples journeys in this school to be tailored by what they have seen on the internet by other students. Talk to your friends, advisors and other in-person resources if youre worried about what kind of path you want to pursue at this school. Once youve looked at a post, after youve read it, try not to dwell on it.

Jethro R. Lee is a third-year data science and psychology combined major. He can be reached at [emailprotected].

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Op-ed: Remember moderate opinions exist but are often concealed ... - The Huntington News

With 3D inkjet printing systems, engineers can fabricate hybrid structures that have soft and rigid components, like robotic grippers that are strong enough to grasp heavy objects but soft enough to interact safely with humans.

These multimaterial 3D printing systems utilize thousands of nozzles to deposit tiny droplets of resin, which are smoothed with a scraper or roller and cured with UV light. But the smoothing process could squish or smear resins that cure slowly, limiting the types of materials that can be used.

Researchers from MIT, the MIT spinout Inkbit, and ETH Zurich have developed a new 3D inkjet printing system that works with a much wider range of materials. Their printer utilizes computer vision to automatically scan the 3D printing surface and adjust the amount of resin each nozzle deposits in real-time to ensure no areas have too much or too little material.

Since it does not require mechanical parts to smooth the resin, this contactless system works with materials that cure more slowly than the acrylates which are traditionally used in 3D printing. Some slower-curing material chemistries can offer improved performance over acrylates, such as greater elasticity, durability, or longevity.

In addition, the automatic system makes adjustments without stopping or slowing the printing process, making this production-grade printer about 660 times faster than a comparable 3D inkjet printing system.

The researchers used this printer to create complex, robotic devices that combine soft and rigid materials. For example, they made a completely 3D-printed robotic gripper shaped like a human hand and controlled by a set of reinforced, yet flexible, tendons.

Our key insight here was to develop a machine-vision system and completely active feedback loop. This is almost like endowing a printer with a set of eyes and a brain, where the eyes observe what is being printed, and then the brain of the machine directs it as to what should be printed next, says co-corresponding author Wojciech Matusik, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who leads the Computational Design and Fabrication Group within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

He is joined on the paper by lead author Thomas Buchner, a doctoral student at ETH Zurich, co-corresponding author Robert Katzschmann PhD 18, assistant professor of robotics who leads the Soft Robotics Laboratory at ETH Zurich; as well as others at ETH Zurich and Inkbit. The research appears today in Nature.

Contact free

This paper builds off a low-cost, multimaterial 3D printer known as MultiFab that the researchers introduced in 2015. By utilizing thousands of nozzles to deposit tiny droplets of resin that are UV-cured, MultiFab enabled high-resolution 3D printing with up to 10 materials at once.

With this new project, the researchers sought a contactless process that would expand the range of materials they could use to fabricate more complex devices.

They developed a technique, known as vision-controlled jetting, which utilizes four high-frame-rate cameras and two lasers that rapidly and continuously scan the print surface. The cameras capture images as thousands of nozzles deposit tiny droplets of resin.

The computer vision system converts the image into a high-resolution depth map, a computation that takes less than a second to perform. It compares the depth map to the CAD (computer-aided design) model of the part being fabricated, and adjusts the amount of resin being deposited to keep the object on target with the final structure.

The automated system can make adjustments to any individual nozzle. Since the printer has 16,000 nozzles, the system can control fine details of the device being fabricated.

Geometrically, it can print almost anything you want made of multiple materials. There are almost no limitations in terms of what you can send to the printer, and what you get is truly functional and long-lasting, says Katzschmann.

The level of control afforded by the system enables it to print very precisely with wax, which is used as a support material to create cavities or intricate networks of channels inside an object. The wax is printed below the structure as the device is fabricated. After it is complete, the object is heated so the wax melts and drains out, leaving open channels throughout the object.

Because it can automatically and rapidly adjust the amount of material being deposited by each of the nozzles in real time, the system doesnt need to drag a mechanical part across the print surface to keep it level. This enables the printer to use materials that cure more gradually, and would be smeared by a scraper.

Superior materials

The researchers used the system to print with thiol-based materials, which are slower-curing than the traditional acrylic materials used in 3D printing. However, thiol-based materials are more elastic and dont break as easily as acrylates. They also tend to be more stable over a wider range of temperatures and dont degrade as quickly when exposed to sunlight.

These are very important properties when you want to fabricate robots or systems that need to interact with a real-world environment, says Katzschmann.

The researchers used thiol-based materials and wax to fabricate several complex devices that would otherwise be nearly impossible to make with existing 3D printing systems. For one, they produced a functional, tendon-driven robotic hand that has 19 independently actuatable tendons, soft fingers with sensor pads, and rigid, load-bearing bones.

We also produced a six-legged walking robot that can sense objects and grasp them, which was possible due to the systems ability to create airtight interfaces of soft and rigid materials, as well as complex channels inside the structure, says Buchner.

The team also showcased the technology through a heart-like pump with integrated ventricles and artificial heart valves, as well as metamaterials that can be programmed to have non-linear material properties.

This is just the start. There is an amazing number of new types of materials you can add to this technology. This allows us to bring in whole new material families that couldnt be used in 3D printing before, Matusik says.

The researchers are now looking at using the system to print with hydrogels, which are used in tissue-engineering applications, as well as silicon materials, epoxies, and special types of durable polymers.

They also want to explore new application areas, such as printing customizable medical devices, semiconductor polishing pads, and even more complex robots.

This research was funded, in part, by Credit Suisse, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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This 3D printer can watch itself fabricate objects - MIT News

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Sean Humbert discusses the team's award-winning research developing autonomous robots that can navigate challenging conditions. The team demonstrated the robots for CBS during a recent visit to the Edgar Mine in Idaho Springs, CO.

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Since completion of the Subterranean Challenge, faculty and students have been conducting follow-on research and competitions with multiple corporate and government partners.

Research further advancing the capabilities of the Subterranean Challenge Robots is being led by numerous CU Boulder laboratories.

One thousand feet underground, a four-legged creature scavenges through tunnels in pitch darkness. With vision that cuts through the blackness, it explores a spider web of paths, remembering its every step and navigating with precision. The sound of its movements echo eerily off the walls, but it is not to be feared this is no wild animal; it is an autonomous rescue robot.

Initially designed to find survivors in collapsed mines, caves, and damaged buildings, that is only part of what it can do.

Created by a team of University of Colorado Boulder researchers and students, the robots placed third as the top US entry and earned $500,000 in prize money at a Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency Subterranean Challenge competition in 2021.

Two years later, they are pushing the technology even further, earning new research grants to expand the technology and create new applications in the rapidly growing world of autonomous systems.

Ideally you dont want to put humans in harms way in disaster situations like mines or buildings after earthquakes; the walls or ceilings could collapse and maybe some already have, said Sean Humbert, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Robotics Program at CU Boulder. These robots can be disposable while still providing situational awareness.

The team developed an advanced system of sensors and algorithms to allow the robots to function on their own once given an assignment, they make decisions autonomously on how to best complete it.

A major goal is to get them from engineers directly into the hands of first responders. Success requires simplifying the way the robots transmit data into something approximating plain English, according to Kyle Harlow, a computer science PhD student.

The robots communicate in pure math. We do a lot of work on top of that to interpret the data right now, but a firefighter doesnt have that kind of time, Harlow said.

To make that happen Humbert is collaborating with Chris Heckman, an associate professor of computer science, to change both how the robots communicate and how they represent the world. The robots eyes a LiDAR sensor creates highly detailed 3D maps of an environment, 15 cm at a time. Thats a problem when they try to relay information the sheer amount of data clogs up the network.

Humans dont interpret the environment in 15 cm blocks, Humbert said. Were now working on whats called semantic mapping, which is a way to combine contextual and spatial information. This is closer to how the human brain represents the world and is much less memory intensive.

The team is also integrating new sensors to make the robots more effective in challenging environments. The robots excel in clear conditions but struggle with visual obstacles like dust, fog, and snow. Harlow is leading an effort to incorporate millimeter wave radar to change that.

We have all these sensors that work well in the lab and in clean environments, but we need to be able to go out in places such as Colorado where it snows sometimes, Harlow said.

Where some researchers are forced to suspend work when a grant ends, members of the subterranean robotics team keep finding new partners to push the technology further.

Eric Frew, a professor of aerospace at CU Boulder, is using the technology for a new National Institute of Standards and Technology competition to develop aerial robots drones instead of ground robots, to autonomously map disaster areas indoors and outside.

Our entry is based directly on the Subterranean Challenge experience and the systems developed there, Frew said.

Some teams in the competition will be relying on drones navigated by human operators, but Frew said CU Boulders project is aiming for an autonomous solution that allows humans to focus on more critical tasks.

Although numerous universities and private businesses are advancing autonomous robotic systems, Humbert said other organizations often focus on individual aspects of the technology. The students and faculty at CU Boulder are working on all avenues of the systems and for uses in environments that present extreme challenges.

Weve built world-class platforms that incorporate mapping, localization, planning, coordination all the high level stuff, the autonomy, thats all us, Humbert said. There are only a handful of teams across the world that can do that. Its a huge advantage that CU Boulder has.

Originally posted here:

Building next generation autonomous robots to serve humanity - CU Boulder's College of Engineering & Applied Science

A few years ago, composer Matthew Suttor was exploring Alan Turings archives at Kings College, Cambridge, when he happened upon a typed draft of a lecture the pioneering computer scientist and World War II codebreaker gave in 1951 foreseeing the rise of artificial intelligence.

In the lecture, Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical Theory, Turing posits that intellectuals would oppose the advent of artificial intelligence out of fear that machines would replace them.

It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this, Turing writes in a passage that includes his handwritten edits. There would be plenty to do, trying to understand what the machines were trying to say, i.e., in trying to keep ones (sic) intelligence up to the standard set by the machines

To Suttor, the passage underscores Turings visionary brilliance.

Reading it was kind of a mind-blowing moment as were now on the precipice of Turings vision becoming our reality, said Suttor, program manager at Yales Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) a campus interdisciplinary center engaged in creative research and practice across disciplines and a senior lecturer in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies in Yales Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Inspired by Turings 1951 lecture, and other revelations from his papers, Suttor is working with a team of musicians, theater makers, and computer programmers (including several alumni from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale) to create an experimental opera, called I AM ALAN TURING, which explores his visionary ideas, legacy, and private life.

I didnt envision a chronological biographical operatic piece To me, it was much more interesting to investigate Turings ideas.

Matthew Suttor

In keeping with Turings vision, the team has partnered with artificial intelligence on the project, using successive versions of GPT, a large language model, to help write the operas libretto and spoken text.

Three work-in-progress performances of the opera formed the centerpiece of the Machine as Medium Symposium: Matter and Spirit, a recent two-day event produced by CCAM that investigated how AI and other technologies intersect with creativity and alter how people approach timeless questions on the nature of existence.

The symposium, whose theme Matter and Spirit was derived from Turings writings, included panel discussions with artists and scientists, an exhibition of artworks made with the help of machines or inspired by technology, and tour of the Yale School of Architectures robotic lab led by Hakim Hasan, a lecturer at the school who specializes in robotic fabrication and computational design research.

All sorts of projects across fields and disciplines are using AI in some capacity, said Dana Karwas, CCAMs director. With the opera, Matthew and his team are using it as a collaborative tool in bringing Alan Turings ideas and story into a performance setting and creating a new model for opera and other types of live performance.

Its also an effective platform for inviting further discussion about technology that many people are excited about or questioning right now, and is a great example of the kind of work were encouraging at CCAM.

Turing is widely known for his work at Bletchley Park, Great Britains codebreaking center during World War II, where he cracked intercepted Nazi ciphers. But he was also a path-breaking scholar whose work set the stage for the development of modern computing and artificial intelligence.

His Turing Machine, developed in 1936, was an early computational device that could implement algorithms. In 1950, he published an article in the journal Mind that asked: Can machines think? He also made significant contributions to theoretical biology, which uses mathematical abstractions in seeking to better understand the structures and systems within living organisms.

A gay man, Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for gross indecency after acknowledging a sexual relationship with a man, which was then illegal in Great Britain, and underwent chemical castration in lieu of a prison sentence. He died by suicide in 1954, age 41.

Before visiting Turings archive, Suttor had read Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges authoritative 1983 biography, and believed the mathematicians life possessed an operatic scale.

I didnt envision a chronological biographical operatic piece, which frankly is a pretty dull proposition, Suttor said. To me, it was much more interesting to investigate Turings ideas. How do you put those on stage and sing about them in a way that is moving, relevant, and dramatically exciting?

Thats when Smita Krishnaswamy, an associate professor of genetics and computer science at Yale, introduced Suttor and his team to OpenAI and several Zoom conversations with representatives of the company about the emerging technology followed. Working with Yale University Librarys Digital Humanities Lab, the team built an interface to interact with an instance, or single occurrence, of GPT-2, training it with materials from Turings archive and the text of books hes known to have read. For example, they knew Turing enjoyed George Bernard Shaws play Back to Methuselah, and Snow White, the Brothers Grimm fairytale, so they shared those texts with the AI.

The team began asking GPT-2 the kinds of questions that Turing had investigated, such as Can machines think? They could control the temperature of the models answers or, the creativity or randomness and the number of characters the responses contained. They continually adjusted the settings on those controls and honed their questions to vary the answers.

Some of the responses are just jaw-droppingly beautiful, Suttor said. You are the applause of the galaxy, for instance, is something you might print on a T-shirt.

In one prompt, the team asked the AI technology to generate lyrics for a sexy song about the operas subject, which yielded the lyrics to Im a Turing Machine, Baby.

In composing the operas music, Suttor and his team incorporated elements of Turings work on morphogenesis the biological process that develops cells and tissues and phyllotaxis, the botanical study of mathematical patterns found in stems, leaves, and seeds. For instance, Suttor found that diagrams Turing had produced showing the spiral patterns of seeds in a sunflower head conform to a Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two before it. Suttor superimposed the circle of fifths a method in music theory of organizing the 12 chromatic pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths onto Turings diagram, producing a unique mathematical, harmonic progression.

Suttor repeated the process using prime numbers numbers greater than 1 that are not the product of two smaller numbers in place of the Fibonacci sequence, which also produced a harmonic series. The team sequenced analog synthesizers to these harmonic progressions.

It sounds a little like Handel on acid, he said.

The workshop version of I AM ALAN TURING was performed on three consecutive nights before a packed house in the CCAM Leeds Studio. The show, in its current form, consists of eight pieces of music that cross genres. Some are operatic with a chorus and soloist, some sound like pop music, and some evoke musical theater. While Suttor composed key structural pieces, the entire team has collaborated like a band while creating the music.

At the same time, the shows storytelling is delivered through various modes: opera, pop, and acted drama. At the beginning, an actor portraying Turing stands at a chalkboard drawing the sunflowers spiral pattern.

Another scene is drawn from a transcript of Turings comments during a panel discussion, broadcast by the BBC, about the potential of artificial intelligence. In that conversation, Turing spars with a skeptical colleague who doesnt believe machines could reach or exceed human levels of intelligence.

Turing made that point during that BBC panel that hed trained machines to do things, which took a lot of work, and they both learned something from the process, Suttor said. I think that captures our experience working with GPT to draft the script.

The show also contemplates Turings sexuality and the persecution he endured because of it. One sequence shows Turing enjoying a serene morning in his kitchen beside a partner, sipping tea and eating toast. His partner reads the paper. Turing scribbles in a notebook. A housecat makes its presence felt.

Its the life that Turing never had, Suttor said.

In high school, Turing had a close friendship with classmate Christopher Morcom, who succumbed to tuberculosis while both young men were preparing to attend Cambridge. Morcom has been described as Turings first true love.

Turing wrote a letter called Nature of Spirit to Christophers mother in which he imagines the possibility of multiple universes and how the soul and the body are intrinsically linked.

In the opera, a line from the letter is recited following the scene, in Turings kitchen, that showed a glimmer of domestic tranquility: Personally, I think that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not always by the same kind of body.

The show closed with an AI-generated text, seemingly influenced by Snow White: Look in the mirror, do you realize how beautiful you are? You are the applause of the galaxy.

The I AM ALAN TURING experimental opera was just one of many projects presented during Machine as Medium: Matter and Spirit, a two-day symposium that demonstrated the kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations driven by Yales Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM).

An exhibition at the centers York Street headquarters highlighted works created with, or inspired by, various kinds of machines and technology, including holograms, motion capture, film and immersive media, virtual reality, and even an enormous robotic chisel. An exhibition tour allowed the artists to connect while describing their work to the public. The discussion among the artists and guests typifies the sense of community that CCAM aims to provide, said Lauren Dubowski 14 M.F.A., 23 D.F.A.,CCAM's assistant director,who designed and led the event.

We work to create an environment where anyone can come in and be a part of the conversation, Dubowski said. CCAM is a space where people can see work that they might not otherwise see, meet people they might not otherwise meet and talk about the unique things happening here.

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Opera gives voice to Alan Turing with help of artificial intelligence - Yale News

Soon after Kristina Monakhova started graduate school, she attended a lecture by Professor Laura Waller 04, MEng 05, PhD 10, director of the University of California at Berkeleys Computational Imaging Lab, who described a kind of computational microscopy with extremely high image resolution.

The talk blew me away, says Monakhova, who is currently an MIT-Boeing Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It definitely changed my trajectory and put me on the path to where I am now. I knew right away that this is what I wanted to do. It was the perfect combination of signal processing, hardware, and algorithms, and I could use it to make more capable imaging sensors for diverse applications.

Today, Monakhovas research involves creating cameras and microscopes designed to produce not high-resolution images for human consumption, but rather information-dense images to be used by algorithms. She aspires to combine imaging system physics with deep learning.

She points out that the purpose of cameras has been fundamentally changed by automation. In many contexts, people dont look at the images; algorithms do, she explains.

A good example of when the data in an image is more important than its visual representation or sharpness is in skin cancer diagnosis, where measuring specific light wavelengths using a hyperspectral camera can help determine whether a certain skin lesion is cancerous and, if so, malignant. While hyperspectral cameras generally cost more than $20,000, Monakhova has designed a cheap computational camera that could be adapted for such diagnosis.

Monakhova says she inherited her early academic ambition from her mother, who brought her to this country from Russia when she was 4 years old.

My mother is my role model and inspiration. She immigrated to the U.S. as a single mother and raised me while completing her PhD in electrical engineering, Monakhova says. I remember spending my elementary school holidays sitting in her classes, drawing. She tried to get me excited about math and science as a child and I guess she succeeded!

By middle school, Monakhova had discovered her interest in engineering after joining a robotics team. When many years later she started graduate school at UC Berkeley, she chose robotics as her first lab, although Waller's computational microscopy lecture drew her away to Waller's lab and to her current field of research.

Starting in the MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence in fall 2022, Monakhova experienced another life-changing event.

My daughter was born on the first day of work at MIT, making for a particularly exciting first day, she says.

Born four weeks early, the baby required an elaborate system of feeding, a process that took almost two hours and needed to be repeated in three-hour increments, which left the parents just one out of every three hours to do everything else.

The first four or five months were a whirlwind of challenges and emotions and doctor appointments, Monakhova says.

Despite those challenges, the new mother continued with her fellowship. Knowing that a postdoc is often a bridge to a faculty position, she took special advantage of a series of program presentations focused on what its like to be a professor and the academic job search process. Although the presentations took place while she was on maternity leave and she wasn't required to participate, Monakhova still attended via Zoom.

I could call in and listen while breastfeeding my newborn infant, she says. I went on the academic job market, and this series was useful to help me get my job materials together and prepare for my interviews.

Monakhova says she is "thankful that MIT has a relatively good maternity and family leave policy, as well as crucial resources, such as lactation rooms, back-up daycare, and a fantastic on-campus daycare program with financial aid available. Without these resources and support, I would have had to quit my career. In order to attract and retain women in science and engineering, we need family-friendly policies that dont penalize women for having babies.

By June, Monakhova had landed a position as an assistant professor at Cornell Universitys Department of Computer Science. Having deferred the appointment, shell start in fall 2024.

Referring to her upcoming work as a professor and lab leader at Cornell, Monakhova says, Im particularly excited to try to set up a collaborative, friendly lab culture where mental health and work-life balance are prioritized, and failure is seen as an important step in the research process.

Throughout her academic career, Monakhova says community has been extremely important. The MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence, which was designed to develop the next generation of faculty leaders and help guide MITs School of Engineering toward supporting more women and others who are underrepresented in engineering, allowed her to explore new research questions in a different area and work with some amazing MIT students on some exciting projects.

I believe its important to help each other out and create a welcoming environment where everyone has the support and resources they need to thrive, says Monakhova, who has an exemplary record of mentoring and giving back. Research and breakthroughs dont happen in isolation theyre the result of teams and communities of people working together.

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Computational imaging researcher attended a lecture, found her ... - MIT News