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In the Media

Financial Times

Lisa Su '91, SM '91, PhD '94 has been named one of the Financial Times’ most influential women of the year. “Lisa Su is a trailblazer,” writes Tsai Ing-wen, the former president of Taiwan. “Su has shattered glass ceilings, becoming the first female CEO to lead AMD, the AI chipmaker based in Silicon Valley, and she has broken stereotypes in her industry.” Ing-Wen adds that Su is a “role model, as well as an example of perseverance and strength who inspires us all.”

TechCrunch

Anna Sun '23 co-founded Nowadays, an AI-powered event planner, reports Julie Bort for TechCrunch. Nowadays “emails venues, caterers, and the like to gather bids,” explains Bort. “It will even make phone calls to nudge a response to unanswered emails. It then organizes the information and presents it to the event planner, who can make decisions and sign contracts.” 

The Boston Globe

The MIT Museum is hosting an “After Dark: Made in the ‘90s” event on December 12, reports Claudine Bellanger for The Boston Globe. The event “will feature retro games, a discussion of the decade’s space exploration pursuits with former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman,” and more, writes Bellanger. 

Boston Business Journal

Boston Business Journal reporter Hannah Green spotlights the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative, a new effort designed to connect researchers, medical professionals, and industry leaders in a shared mission to address some of the most pressing health challenges of our time. Green notes that the collaborative aims to “spur high-impact discoveries and health solutions through interdisciplinary projects across engineering, science, AI, economics, business, policy, design, and the humanities.” 

The Guardian

MIT researchers have developed a gastric balloon that can inflate before eating and contract afterwards in an effort to ensure the body does not grow accustomed to the balloon, reports Nicola Davis for The Guardian. “What we try to do here is, in essence, simulate the mechanical effects of having a meal,” explains Prof. Giovanni Traverso. “What we want to avoid is getting used to that balloon." 

Grist

Grist reporter Matt Simon spotlights a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that finds “large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills.” Graduate student Martin Staadecker explains: “Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important. But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”

The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal reporter John Anderson spotlights NOVA’s “Building Stuff: Change It!” – a program that follows engineers, including Prof. Maria Yang, as they “seek to help humanity adapt to a changing world, drawing on the ideas and traditions of the past to create new technologies.” When discussing efforts to adapt to climate change, Yang explains: “All design is redesign.”

ABC News

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with ABC News reporter Julia Jacobo about the role of green hydrogen in decarbonization efforts. “Hydrogen itself could be a really important component to a green transition,” says Trancik. 

Wired

Using a new technique developed to examine the risks of multimodal large language models used in robots, MIT researchers were able to have a “simulated robot arm do unsafe things like knocking items off a table or throwing them by describing actions in ways that the LLM did not recognize as harmful and reject,” writes Will Knight for Wired. “With LLMs a few wrong words don’t matter as much,” explains Prof. Pulkit Agrawal. “In robotics a few wrong actions can compound and result in task failure more easily.”

Community Updates

Featured Multimedia

Giovanni Traverso creates innovative health solutions and, as both a physician and an engineer, he brings a unique perspective. “Bringing those two domains together is what really can help transform and accelerate our capacity to develop new biomedical devices or new therapies for a range of conditions,” he says. “As physicians, we're extremely fortunate to be able to help individuals. As scientists and engineers, not only can we help individuals… we can help populations.”

Tiddlywinks, a tabletop game in which small colored disks are used to propel other, smaller disks into a cup, might sound simple but according to MIT alumni who have been at the highest ranks of the game for 50+ years, tiddlywinks can be fiercely competitive and challenging. Likening it to chess, the three friends who first met at MIT, all trace their passion for the game back to the Institute.

The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) is made up of 13 different academic units, spanning disciplines from music and literature to economics and political science. Their research pushes the limits of human understanding; studying the ethical, social, economic, and human dimensions of the world’s greatest challenges.

Ariel White is an associate professor of Political Science at MIT where she studies voting and voting rights. In this episode, Ariel speaks with President Kornbluth about what is actually known immediately following an election, the challenges of exit polls, and what efforts work in getting people to vote.

A new design tool uses UV and RGB lights to change the color and textures of everyday objects. The system could enable surfaces to display dynamic patterns, such as health data and fashion designs. The researchers envision that one day, consumers could wear a cloak to change a shirt design, or use a car cover to give their vehicle a new look.

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