Skip to Content
Seen on campus

A Symbol of Strength, a Place to Reflect

June 23, 2015

When Professor J. Meejin Yoon designed the memorial for Sean Collier, the MIT police officer killed in the line of duty in April 2013, she used granite—32 massive chunks of it—as a symbol of strength and a nod to the New Hampshire mountains that Collier liked to climb with the MIT Outing Club. Constructed using both historic stone-setting principles and robotic fabrication technologies, the 190-ton memorial forms the shape of an open hand to represent Collier’s service and generosity. Its five walls join at a central keystone, embodying strength through unity; the open space beneath it suggests his absence. Rob Rogers, one of Collier’s brothers, served as a project manager for the memorial’s construction, and a quotation from his eulogy is engraved along one granite wall: “Live long like he would. Big hearts, big smiles, big service, all love.”

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.