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The Boston Globe

Prof. Thomas Kochan and Prof. Thomas Malone speak with Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray about the recent deal between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which will “protect movie screenwriters from losing their jobs to computers that could use artificial intelligence to generate screenplays.” Kochan notes that when it comes to AI, “where workers don’t have a voice through a union, most companies are not engaging their workers on these issues, and the workers have no rights, no redress.”

Times Higher Education

Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao, a Schmidt Science Fellow in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, writes for Times Higher Education about the need to eliminate barriers between different academic disciplines. “More work needs to be done to support interdisciplinary researchers more generally,” writes Cao. “The lack of funding, incentives and community support holds back the scientific breakthroughs they could otherwise be making.”

GBH

Professor Karilyn Crockett speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about the impact of The “Big Dig” – Boston’s highway project – on the city, its people and urban planning. Crockett “argues that despite all the incentives to build, build, build, the costs of that building would eventually force city residents to think the unthinkable,” says Coss. “So the anti-highway fight becomes a moment of imagining possibilities,” says Crockett. 

The Hill

The Hill reporter Sharon Udasin writes that MIT researchers have developed a new solar-powered desalination device that “could last several years and generate water at a rate and price that is less expensive than tap water.” The researchers estimated that “if their model was scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour,” writes Udasin.

IEEE Spectrum

MIT researchers have developed a new underwater system that could enable long-range and low-power underwater communication, reports Edd Gent for IEEE Spectrum. “The reason why this is really exciting is because now you start opening up many of the coastal monitoring applications,” says Prof. Fadel Adib. “It’s a turning point from this being a technology that is intellectually super interesting that we hope will work, to saying we know that this works and we have a path to deployment.”

GBH

Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate Fred Salvucci BS '61 SM '62 speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about his role in Boston’s “Big Dig” project. “The idea for the Big Dig began with an unlikely friendship,” explains Coss. “During the highway debates in the early 70s, Fred Salvucci – one of the highway opponents – went to a ton of meetings. And across the table at many of those meetings was a man named Bill Reynolds; he was there to represent the road builders.”

Forbes

MIT has been named to Times Higher Education’s 2024 World’s Best Universities list, reports Cecilia Rodriguez for Forbes. “The largest edition of the World University Rankings 2024 includes 1,904 universities—up from 1,799 last year—from 108 countries and regions, assessing research-intensive universities across 18 performance indicators covering their core missions of teaching, research, knowledge transfer and internationalization,” writes Rodriguez.

WBZ Radio

WBZ News Radio’s Emma Friedman spotlights the #IfThenSheCan Exhibit at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival, which features 30, 3-D printed orange statues of women innovators in science, technology, engineering and math, six of whom are MIT affiliates.

The Wall Street Journal

A study by researchers from MIT and Harvard examined the potential impact of the use of AI technologies on the field of radiology, reports Laura Landro for The Wall Street Journal. “Both AI models and radiologists have their own unique strengths and areas for improvement,” says Prof. Nikhil Agarwal.

The Boston Globe

William Pounds, the former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management who was “famous for being willing to approach and talk to anybody,” has died at age 95. “As an administrator, he wanted to guide business school graduates to become able leaders of corporations like the ones where he had worked," writes Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe.

Forbes

Researchers from Atlantic Quantum, an MIT startup building quantum computers, have published new research showing “the architecture of the circuits underlying its quantum computer produces far fewer errors than the industry standard,” reports Rashi Shrivastava for Forbes.

HealthDay News

A new study by Prof. Jonathan Gruber finds that helping undocumented immigrants in the U.S. connect with primary care doctors could help reduce ER visits, reports Cara Murez for HealthDay. “The data showed a 21% drop in emergency department use, as well as a 42% drop for folks with high-risk medical profiles,” writes Murez. 

Featured Multimedia

Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a leader in the development of tiny particles known as quantum dots, has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2023. He will share the prize with Louis Brus of Columbia University and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology, Inc.

Neal Carlson SM ’65, EAA ’65, PhD ’69 has always liked to fix things, so when his church needed someone to repair bicycles for its annual auction, he volunteered. “Being reasonably mechanical, I thought, ‘That’s something I can do,’” Carlson says. “It turned out it’s been a very rewarding process.”

MIT's 2023 Commencement speaker, engineer, educator, and YouTuber Mark Rober engaged with students and researchers while visiting various labs and maker-spaces in MIT Maker Alley.

In this episode of Curiosity Unbounded, President Sally Kornbluth talks with Associate Professor Fadel Adib about his work and how he’s inspired to solve pressing global issues. They discuss his belief in the importance of inspiring others and democratizing advanced tools and technologies, as well as his early life in Lebanon and his family-held belief that education has the power to change lives.

MIT Mechanical Engineering Course 2-A/6 pairs MechE classes with computer science and electrical engineering. Drawn to MechE by photos from of one of the department’s most notable classes, Product Engineering Processes, Sharmi Shah SB ’23 picked 2-A/6, and a focus on robotics, as a path toward making the world a better place.

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