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Yoel Fink stands under an unassuming LED ceiling lamp wearing what appears to be just an ordinary baseball cap. “Do you hear it?” he asks. Semiconductor technology within the fibers of the hat is converting the audio encoded in light pulses to electrical pulses, he explains, and those pulses are then converted to sound. “This is one of the first examples of an advanced fabric. It looks like an ordinary hat but it’s really a sophisticated optical communication system.”

“Learning a new language gives you a window into someone else’s world,” says Virginia Adams, who graduated from MIT this past May. For Adams, learning Chinese has given her a glimpse into a fascinating, fast-paced culture where technology is rapidly advancing. As a MISTI (MIT International Science & Technology Initiatives) intern at Tencent, a large technology company in Shenzhen, China, Adams hones her ability to communicate with her Chinese co-workers and friends in order to better build the programs that instruct computers to communicate.

Will Dickson ’14 has parked General Motors’ first self-driving vehicle, the Cruise AV, on campus and invited MIT students to think flexibly about its design opportunities. “You are future engineers and thought leaders in the area of new machines,” he says. “How do you design future vehicles like this one better for a safe and autonomous experience?”

The rise of 5G, or fifth generation, mobile technologies is refashioning the wireless communications and networking industry. The School of Engineering recently asked Muriel Médard, the Cecil H. Green Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT, to explain what that means and why it matters.