Category: iMSE News & Events

Skylar Tibbits: Self-Assembly & Programmable Materials

Thursday, November 21

6:30 PM | 315F and Zoom

Skylar will present work from MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab that spans from materials development to new fabrication approaches and self-organizing construction systems. 

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Julian Palacio.

Skylar Tibbits is a designer and computer scientist whose research focuses on developing self-assembly and programmable materials within the built environment. Tibbits is the founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, and Associate Professor of Design Research in the Department of Architecture. He is also the director of the undergraduate Design programs in the Department of Architecture.

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.

For Zoom attendance, please register here.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

In a 2020 survey of 3,000 coding boot camp graduates by CourseReport, 79% of respondents said the courses had helped them land a job, with an average salary increase of 56%. Yet the industry pulled back from hiring as AI coding tools started to become mainstream. The number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56% from five years ago, according to data compiled by CompTIA, and 67% for inexperienced developers.

Learning to Code in an AI World

Although academics mostly stuck with X in the year after the poll, Bluesky has rapidly emerged as the new online gathering place for researchers, Kucharski among them. They are drawn by its Twitter-like feel, welcoming features, and, increasingly, the critical mass of scientists in many fields who have already made the move. “The majority has spoken, and researchers are moving en masse” to Bluesky, says De-Shaine Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University who has also migrated to Bluesky.

https://www.science.org/content/article/old-twitter-scientific-community-finds-new-home-bluesky

Facing erasure due to climate change, the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu is digitally backing up everything from its houses to its trees as it endeavors to save whatever it can.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241121-tuvalu-the-pacific-islands-creating-a-digital-nation-in-the-metaverse-due-to-climate-change

Among the approaches of circular construction, the reuse of buildings is the most desirable as it leaves a large portion of embodied carbon untouched. At the same time, it also minimizes the energy effort of modifying, transporting, or reprocessing components. Above all, the load-bearing structure is the central aspect. It is the most durable, most existentially imperative, most spatially defining, and the most energy-intensive part of a building (Fivet 2019; Hopkinson et al. 2018). Globally, many buildings’ astonishingly short lifespan results from the design’s short-sightedness, not that of its materials. While load-bearing structures can often serve for decades, uses change much more quickly. “All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong,” concluded Brand in his influential study of how buildings change over time (Brand 1995).

Read more here.

Adaptable buildings are a vital part of circularity in the built environment. With long-term owners, defined sustainability goals, and frequently shifting programmatic and organizational needs, college campus buildings are positioned to be at the forefront of this movement. Many Design for Adaptability (DfA) strategies are published, but there is a scarcity of empirical evidence showing that they work. This study investigated whether these DfA features in US college campus buildings led to more adaptation and reuse. Data were collected on 26 adapted or demolished buildings and were analyzed using logistic analysis. The results suggest that DfA features lead to more adaptations, providing evidence for campus decision-makers that these strategies work.

Read more here.

The upcoming issue of TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) seeks submissions that critically investigate the potential of generative systems in the allied design fields.

Read more here.

Smart roads with advanced vehicle-sensing capabilities could be the linchpin of future intelligent transportation systems and could even help extend driverless cars‘ perceptual range. A new approach that fuses camera and radar data can now track vehicles precisely at distances of up to 500 meters.

Real-time data on the flow and density of traffic can help city managers avoid congestion and prevent accidents. So-called “roadside perception,” which uses sensors and cameras to track vehicles, can help create smart roads that continually gather this information and relay it to control rooms.

Read more here.

Holographic images have real depth because they are three dimensional, whereas monitors merely simulate depth on a 2D screen. Because we see in three dimensions, holographic images could be integrated seamlessly into our normal view of the everyday world.

“Holography could make virtual and augmented reality displays easily usable, wearable, and ultrathin,” said Heide. They could transform how we interact with our environments, everything from getting directions while driving, to monitoring a patient during surgery, to accessing plumbing instructions while doing a home repair.

Read more here.

The NeuCyber Array BMI System, a self-developed brain-machine interface (BMI) system from China, was unveiled at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Zhongguancun Forum (ZGC Forum) on Thursday in Beijing.

At the forum, a video demonstration revealed a remarkable feat: a monkey with its hands restrained and soft electrode filaments implanted in its brain, controlled an isolated robotic arm and grasped a strawberry by simply using its “thoughts.”

Read more here.