MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology - On Campus and Around the world

President Sally Kornbluth and Governor Maura Healey will kick off the festivities at MIT’s inaugural Future Fest, which aims to bring “together leaders across higher education, government and tech to explore the future of science, technology, art and design across MIT's campus for five days,” writes the Boston Business Journal’s Stephen MacLeod. The festival will also include the Cambridge Science Carnival, featuring “100 booths and activities, and other demonstrations, including a robot petting zoo, a floating installation at the MIT Sailing Pavilion known as the Adaptive Archipelago and the public unveiling of MIT’s new design hub and home of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, the Met Warehouse.” 

A study co-authored by Prof. Amy Finkelstein found that seniors are not only living longer, but also living relatively healthier lives for longer periods of time,, writes Forbes’ Howard Gleckman. “As a result, while older adults still need personal care and other supports, they can put off this assistance for years,” notes Gleckman. “Or to put it another way, additional years in old age, even very old age, are on average healthy ones. They do not result in extra years of serious illness and care needs.”  

MassLive’s “Most Influential Innovators” list, which celebrates inventors from across the Commonwealth, spotlights numerous MIT community members including President Sally Kornbluth; Prof. Russ Tedrake; Visiting Scientist Brandon Sorbom PhD ‘17, co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems; Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw PhD ‘20, CEO of Aurelia Institute; Maxim Lobovsky MS ‘11, CEO of Formlabs; Noubar Afeyan PhD ‘87, CEO of Flagship Pioneering; and Andy Ory, CEO of MIT spinout QuEra Computing. “Kornbluth has been working hard to defend the university, which has long been a major economic engine not just for Massachusetts, but for the country,” writes reporter Scott Kirsner. 

According to new research by MIT physicists, a laser able to capture neutrinos, abundant yet intangible particles in the universe, is likely impossible to build, writes New Scientist’s Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. “The key to the neutrino laser proposal was a memory effect: when an atom in the BEC (Bose-Einstein condensate) emitted a neutrino, it would be more likely to continue emitting more neutrinos in the same direction, thus pushing them into a beam, because the quantum state that all the ultracold atoms share would retain a trace of that first emission,” Padavic-Callaghan explains. “[Prof. Wolfgang] Ketterle and his colleagues showed that this memory, although present, would be about 10,000 billion times too brief to affect the neutrinos as intended.” 

MIT researchers have developed an AI-powered robotic therapy system that combines wearable force sensors and camera recordings of physical therapists’ movements to provide personalized therapy to patients, writes Newsweek’s Claudia Tanner. “Robotic assistance will allow patients to practice exercises more often while still receiving support tailored to their abilities,” says Johannes Lachner, who completed this work as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. “Our goal is to take a step toward more accessible and personalized physical rehabilitation, giving more patients the opportunity to regain movement and independence.” 

Writing for The Boston Globe, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif describes the need to develop a universal “moral floor,” like the Ten Commandments, which provide clear guidelines for the use of AI. “Today, people are creating and developing intelligence that is much more capable, in narrow ways, than our own,” Reif explains. “We owe humanity the same discipline to civilize AI before it is too late: Write down what lines must never be crossed, make the list short enough to remember, and hold every actor building it, and using it, accountable for its actions.”

Postdoctoral Associate Rohan Naidu joins John Batchelor and David Livingston, hosts of the “Hotel Mars” podcast, to discuss his research discovering black hole stars from little red dots using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. “When we first discovered the little red dots, we assumed that red means dust, and so the idea was that the little red dots are the kind of black holes that we see in our backyard,” says Naidu. “But now we have this paradigm shift where we are realizing that red does not mean dust. Red could mean that you have this black hole star kind of object where all the blue light is being soaked up in this dense star-like cocoon.” 

Prof. David Autor speaks to Financial Times reporter Christian Davies about the increased use of physical AI systems at U.S. manufacturing companies. “[Autor says] that while individual companies might increase headcount as they grow more productive, it is a fallacy to assume this will be replicated across the manufacturing sector as a whole, noting that previous waves of automation in the US have all driven large-scale declines in blue-collar employment,” writes Davies.  

MassLive’s Juliet Schulman-Hall covers a new report from the MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning and Research Training about AI and education at MIT. “It’s rare that a successful institution has to take a fresh look at many aspects of its mission,” said President Sally Kornbluth in a letter to the community. “But I’m convinced that the opportunities and risks generative AI poses for our model of education and research now constitute such a watershed for MIT — and for all of higher education.” 

Prof. Paul Osterman speaks to Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg about how his new book “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment” explores how a perceived lack of ambition among Gen Z reflects the decreased amount of job security and opportunity available to young workers. “No one has job security anymore, but these folks [disposable workers] are hired with that expectation and are not going to be around for long,” says Osterman.