Proteins are the workhorses that keep our cells running, and there are many thousands of types of proteins in our cells, each performing a specialized function. Researchers have long known that the structure of a protein determines what it can do.
During a meeting of class 6.C40/24.C40 (Ethics of Computing), Professor Armando Solar-Lezama poses the same impossible question to his students that he often asks himself in the research he leads with the Computer Assisted Programming Group at MIT:
This past month Martin Rinard, MIT professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) and CSAIL principal investigator, received the 2025 Outstanding Research Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT). The organization awarded him for his “fundamental contributions in pioneering the new fields of program repair and approximate computing.”
Imagine you’re a chef with a highly sought-after recipe. You write your top-secret instructions in a journal to ensure you remember them, but its location within the book is evident from the folds and tears on the edges of that often-referenced page.