By his own admission, Héctor Javier Vázquez Martínez was underprepared to move to Zurich for a semester during his junior year. His cell phone plan didn’t work, he’d forgotten to change his money, and he didn’t know German. However, it didn’t take him long to find his way.
In the basement of MIT’s Building 3, a robot is carefully contemplating its next move. It gently pokes at a tower of blocks, looking for the best block to extract without toppling the tower, in a solitary, slow-moving, yet surprisingly agile game of Jenga.
Pawan Sinha, a professor of vision and computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, first met Poonam when the girl was 13 years old. She lived in a remote village far from the urban bustle of Delhi, the second most-populous city in India.
