As part of their Women in Politics: College Edition series, MSNBC highlights undergraduate Sophia Liu’s work in student government at MIT. Liu explains that she was drawn to student government because she wanted “to meet more MIT students, and because I hoped to start giving back to a community that I treasured and believed was incredibly special.”
CBS News reporter Brian Mastroianni writes about how social media users celebrated Pi Day this year, highlighting two of MIT’s Facebook posts. One of the MIT Pi Day posts featured MIT students writing down as many digits of π as possible from memory, while the other wished Albert Einstein a happy birthday.
MIT admission’s office released a “Star Wars”-themed video to announce that admissions decisions would be released on Pi Day, writes Amanda Hoover for Boston.com. Hoover explains that, “In true MIT fashion, the university released their admission decisions for the class of 2020 on Pi Day (March 14) at 6:28 p.m., which is known as Tau, or two-times pi.”
Christian Science Monitor reporter Jack Detsch writes about the “Cambridge 2 Cambridge” hackathon, which brought together students from MIT and Cambridge University to hack websites and discover built-in vulnerabilities. “It’s not a law of nature that machines are insecure,” says CSAIL’s Howard Shrobe. This hackathon “is the first step of piquing curiosity to fix it.”
Steve Annear writes for The Boston Globe about the video MIT Admissions created to announce that admissions decisions will be released on March 14, “Pi Day.” Annear writes that in the video, “a robot the school is calling a ‘Decisions Droid’…emerges from the school’s personal robots lab and makes its way to Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill’s office.”
Wendy Koch of National Geographic spoke with members of the MIT Hyperloop team about their work transforming their design for a levitating pod that could transport people at hundreds of miles an hour into an operational prototype. “It’s a great opportunity to learn and possibly to change the future of transportation,” says project manager and graduate student John Mayo.
MIT Hyperloop team members Philippe Kirschen and Sabrina Ball speak with Mike Nikitas of NECN about the team’s approach to the SpaceX competition. “We wanted to design a pod that was safe, scalable and feasible,” explains Kirschen.” We really focused on the technology that we thought we could develop… that could possibly be applied to a full-scale hyperloop.”
Nidhi Subbaraman writes for BetaBoston about “Cambridge 2 Cambridge,” an international cybersecurity challenge that will take place this spring between researchers from MIT CSAIL and the University of Cambridge. Prof. Howard Shrobe explained that the contest will take the form of a virtual “capture the flag” contest.
Wired reporter Alex Davies speaks with graduate student Phillipe Kirschen, team captain of the MIT Hyperloop team, about the team’s strategy. Kirschen explains that the team is focused on developing a “pod that is gonna go really fast, that is gonna levitate, that can have good attitude control, and that can brake well.”
Tech reporter Scott Perry writes about the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund program, which aims to support student innovators and entrepreneurs. Dean Ian Waitz explains that the goal of the program is “developing the students, not the ideas,” adding that he hopes Sandbox will become “entrenched in the Institute’s culture much in the way UROP or UPOP has.”
Graduate student Chris Merian, chief engineer for MIT's Hyperloop team, speaks with Radio Boston’s Meghna Chakrabarti about the team’s success in the Hyperloop contest. Merian says the team saw the competition as a, “really cool engineering challenge that we are really passionate about, and seeing our hundreds of hours of work rewarded like that was really, really nice.”
Popular Science’s Priscilla Mosqueda writes about the team of MIT students that won the first round of the SpaceX competition. “We had a clear message: our pod was about making something safe, stable and feasible,” explains team captain and graduate student Philippe Kirschen.
A team of MIT students won the first round of the SpaceX Hyperloop competition for their design of a pod that could transport passengers on a conceptual high-speed transportation system. MIT and other top teams will build and test their designs at the Hyperloop Test Track in California, reports the Associated Press.
Boston Herald reporter Laurel Sweet writes that a team of MIT students has won the first round of the SpaceX Hyperloop contest. “Powered by renewable energy, Hyperloop aims to rocket floating passenger pods through elevated tubes at nearly the speed of sound,” writes Sweet.
MIT students captured the top spot in the first round of the SpaceX Hyperloop competition for their design for passenger pods that could travel on a high-speed transportation system, reports David Morris for Fortune.