MIT

Greg Hum reports that last night, he took part in the Umbrella Project, a collaboration between MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Pilobolus dance troupe, in which participants were given umbrellas outfitted with LEDs and then directed by Pilobolus members in a large outdoor "display of live art."

The scene. Photograph by Cory Gardner.

Updated with MIT info.

Kanako Miura, 36, a visiting scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, died this afternoon when she was struck by a dump truck, MIT and Stanley Staco report.

Boston Police report the victim was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after the 3:30 p.m. incident.

A mangled silver and black bicycle, believed to be hers, was found several blocks away on Bay State Road at Silber Way, Brian D'Amico reports.

GigaOm introduces us to the Makr Shakr, a joint venture between MIT, Coca Cola and Bacardi to put bartenders out of work let you customize drinks via your smartphone (with as few vowels as possible).

MIT boasts that Makr Shakr can not only mix drinks, but can also monitor alcohol consumption and blood alcohol levels. So while it may not wipe down glasses while listening to your troubles, the Makr Shakr has a lot going for it should anyone decide to turn it into a production robot.

Via Boston Eater.

NECN covers the Sean Collier memorial service at MIT today.

Comments by MIT Police Chief John DiFava.

Complete listing; roads, including Memorial Drive between the BU Bridge and Mass. Ave., and the Mass. Ave. bridge into Cambridge, will be closed during the morning rush hour.

Dana noticed the Alchemist at the MIT student center is sporting a new shoulder patch today.

UPDATE: At 12:07 a.m, Cambridge Police tweeted the officer died.

Around 10:50 p.m. at 32 Vassar St. The suspect, who fired six shots, is described as a Hispanic male in a cowboy hat, might have the officer's blood on him. The officer was rushed to Mass. General.

MIT Police warned students and staff to stay well away from the Stata Center. MBTA police are swarming the Red Line in case he tried to escape by train.

Photo from inside the Stata Center (somewhat graphic).

And in that, Delian Asparouhov succeeded - which prompted him to apologize to the entire MIT campus early this morning:

I made a lot of people mad, and made many people very scared, and for that I feel terrible. MIT has already gone through a lot in the last few months, and my actions were completely inappropriate. I should have never written the email, and especially not sent it out to the entire school.

Asparouhov then explains what he did and why - too late to realize it was not the brightest of ideas:

At the time, I wasn't thinking about the gun scare. I wasn’t even thinking about the Aaron Swartz case I had copied into the email. All I was thinking in composing that email was to make it seem like an email President Reif would actually compose.

I walked away from my computer to go eat some food, and I was still worry-free until I saw the email on a friend's computer. Reading through it, with the official letterhead, I realized how this appeared in context with the Aaron case and the recent gun scare.

The family of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January weeks before he was due to face trial on data-theft charges, is asking a federal judge to order both the government and MIT to release documentation relating to his prosecution, including the names of law-enforcement and MIT officials actively involved in the case.

Through its lawyers, the Swartz family argues the public outcry and Congressional investigations into Swartz's prosecution require the release of the names to help determine what really happened and who was responsible.

An MIT official today provided more details on the gun hoax that shut some MIT buildings and Massachusetts Avenue on Saturday.

In a letter to the Tech, Executive VP and Treasurer Israel Ruiz writes:

One minute into the communication, the caller reported someone with a "really big gun," and "armor" who was "getting out of control." The CPD dispatcher immediately sent CPD units and State Police to the site, and notified MIT Police.

Ruiz also writes that while police responded very well to the perceived threat, they should have alerted the MIT community earlier than 90 minutes into the incident that something might be happening.

Cambridge Police report the communications about an alleged rifleman in body armor at MIT on Saturday came via an "an internet relay" usually used to let people with hearing or speech impairments communicate:

The relay service used in this instance was a Sprint relay service, and a Sprint employee notified the police department of the conversation with the reporting party.

During this conversation, a possible suspect was mentioned and police immediately identified and interviewed him. After questioning, police determined that this individual had no knowledge of the incident and do not believe he was involved in making this false report at this time.

UPDATE: The Globe reports it was a hoax "electronic message." WBZ reports the FBI and the Secret Service have joined the investigation, while campus police try to explain why it took them more than an hour to issue an alert.

At 8:47 a.m., MIT Police issued an alert:

This morning information was received from Cambridge Police that there was a person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT. Multiple law enforcement agencies have responded, stay indoors and shelter in place and report suspicious activity to the campus police dispatch dial 100.

Mass. Ave. was shut near the building and Route 1 buses were diverted.

At 9:33, Cambridge Police tweeted:

Police responded to report of man w/ gun inside building on Mass Ave. Police searched building w/ negative results.

By 9:50, police were taking off their bullet-proof vests.

At 10:19, Cambridge Police tweeted:

Scene is clear. Call unfounded. No threat to public safety.

Early this morning, John Hawkinson tweeted:

Just saw a rabbit in Mid-Cambridge 20' off Mass Ave. When did this start?

Quite awhile ago, according to our go-to guy for matters Cantabrigian, Robert Winters:

There were rabbits sighted this past year off Harvard Street between Trowbridge & Ellery Sts. They're around.

Nat Tarbox adds:

Walk around the river path near Harvard, there is a rabbit every ten feet.

Kathy C reports:

last summer, cute bunnies in weedy parking lot at Mass Ave and Albany.

Siobhan Gallagher cautions:

Look closely at them. Don't think they're our cottontails but, rather, an invasive breed.

WBUR posts a statement by US Attorney Carmen Ortiz.

Meanwhile, a California congresswoman is proposing changes to the law used to go after Swartz to try to keep anybody else from going through what he did.

Needs 25,000 signatories to get a government response.

Statement by his family:

Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles.

Aaron Swartz, 26, who co-founded Reddit and who allegedly broke into an MIT wiring closet to download large numbers of academic articles from a non-profit database, committed suicide, the Tech reports.

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig expresses his outrage at the Department of Justice's prosecution of the case even as the database's owner declined to press charges:

From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The "property" Aaron had "stolen," we were told, was worth "millions of dollars" - with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

A roving UHub photographer captured the scene this morning at the Great Dome, where Pacman hopes to gobble up the energy pills while avoiding Blinky.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday, MIT and Children's Hospital charge Shire Regenerative Medicine's product aimed at people with diabetic foot ulcers violates patents they hold for building skin grafts on a polyester matrix.

The two local institutions say Shire's Dermagraft, in which cells from newborn foreskins are laid on a thin membrane to grow a layer of skin that are then applied atop the ulcers that some diabetic patients develop on their feet.

They're seeking tons of money for the injuries the alleged patent infrigement has done them.

One of the patents.

The Tech reports last week's Cambridge power outage blew out so many wireless access points across campus that the school has had to order replacement units:

Until then, IS&T recommends connecting to the MIT network via Ethernet connections whenever possible. Students may visit the IS&T office in E17-110 to pick up an Ethernet cable.

The MIT Tech provides the most detailed explanation you'll ever read of last week's Cambridge blackout, including an answer to the question:

Why didn't MIT's 20 megawatt cogeneration turbine power the campus like a lighthouse in a sea of Cantabrigian darkness?

The story behind HoboJacket, in which the author spends most of his time discussing how he built the site and ends with a comparison to Mark Zuckerberg (note to kid: He went to, um, Harvard). Among the valuable life lessons he learned from making bums/Caltech the butt of his joke:

People like to mess with you. The forms on the page are only capable of submitting integers to the database server (ie. every state and university has a numerical id; all data transmission is conducted by passing around those ids and some other datum.). I took a look at some of the server log files. People were sending post requests to donate "balls balls balls" on behalf of "dicksuniversity". I'm glad I took the effort to sanitize inputs or else the database would have been wiped several times already.

Oh, yes, thank goodness for sanitized inputs!

Via Boston Daily.

BocaNewsNow reports a woman in Boca Raton was initially turned away from the polls because she was wearing an MIT shirt.

BocaNewsNow.com has heard from multiple sources that an election supervisor at the polling place ultimately realized that MIT stands for “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” — a school where students tend to know how to spell — and was not a campaign shirt for the Republican candidate, who spells his name MITT.

Via BosGuy.

And that answer is paintballs:

Sung Wook Paek SM '12, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, says if timed just right, pellets full of paint powder, launched in two rounds from a spacecraft at relatively close distance, would cover the front and back of an asteroid, more than doubling its reflectivity, or albedo. The initial force from the pellets would bump an asteroid off course; over time, the sun's photons would deflect the asteroid even more.

A roving UHub photographer couldn't believe it when she saw workers at the top of the Great Dome, working on the tarp covering the oculus being installed there:

Seems that they've decided at the 11th hour to remove the tarp. Scaffold contractor is up there trying to remove it. I'm praying for these guys. Not good conditions to put it mildly.

The Tech reports how MIT didn't wait for a subpoena to give federal investigators detailed network information in their probe of a guy charged with downloading millions of documents from a paid database after allegedly breaking into an MIT wiring closet.