Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman spotlights MIT startup Liquid AI, along with the various AI efforts underway at MIT as part of The Globe’s 2026 Tech Power Players special section. Pressman notes that: “President Sally Kornbluth is reinvigorating the school’s support of the local innovation ecosystem, unveiling new online classes dedicated to AI — with free entry-level classes for anyone — and encouraging more entrepreneurship on campus.”
Associated Press reporter Rodrique Ngowi visits MIT to learn about how researchers in Prof. Xuanhe Zhao’s lab developed an ultrasound wristband that gathers data on human hand motions as part of an effort to help train humanoid robots to undertake complex tasks, from housework to surgery. “Imagine people doing housework,” says Zhao. “We can use the data obtained by our system to train a robot to do exactly (that) housework with this dexterous hand motion.”
Writing for IEEE Spectrum, reporter Matthew S. Smith highlights Fractal, a new operating system hand-coded by CSAIL researchers to provide a clear view of security vulnerabilities. “We paved the way with techniques such as custom kernel patches and kernel extensions,” says graduate student Joseph Ravichandran. “The dream was always to have a completely custom operating system which would make these hacks unnecessary.”
GBH "Particles of Thought" host Hakeem Oluseyi interviews Prof. David Kaiser about the puzzling nature of dark matter and how its explanation may be inconsistent with our assumptions of gravity. “If we assume we really know the laws of gravity, which Einstein wrote down beautifully just over a hundred years ago in his general theory of relativity...we have reason to be confident. But what people are saying is could dark matter be the first exception to that,” says Kaiser.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins New York Times reporter Bill Wasik for a panel discussion about the impact of AI on job security and its potential to supplement work. “The current view is that somehow [AI] agents are going to do a lot of the work and we just need to supervise them,” says Acemoglu. “I find that very unrealistic. But if it was realistic, it would be a horrible thing.”
For Fast Company, reporter Max Ufberg features MIT startup Formlabs, a company that has spent over a decade building 3D printers that make professional grade prototyping cheaper and faster. Using the selective laser sintering (SLS) Fuse X1 machine, Ufberg notes that Formlabs will apply their playbook to larger industrial systems. “The goal has always been make it easier to go from an idea to a real thing,” says Formlabs CEO Maxim Lobovsky ‘11.
In a WBUR article, arts writer Maddie Browning names the new MIT List Visual Arts Center exhibit, “DEAD PIXEL,” by artist and comic book illustrator Pap Souleye Fall, as a highlight to check out this summer. The exhibition, inspired by the black spots that materialize on-screen from technological error, is an ongoing story depicted through performance, sculpture and video. Browning notes that “Fall visualizes the empty spaces as ‘portals to hidden realms of autonomy.’”
Boston Globe reporter Robert Weisman spotlights how MIT is “working to drive artificial intelligence forward in sectors where the region is strongest, from biotechnology and robotics to defense and clean energy. It’s also trying to broaden entrepreneurship through a ‘dorm-to-startup’ push, creating a pipeline of support services — from hack-a-thons to venture funding — to help students to start companies between classes.”
Honorees on The Boston Globe’s 2026 Tech Power Players list shared their reasons for having optimism about the future of the Greater Boston area’s tech and innovation scene. President Sally Kornbluth says opportunities abound in what she calls “AI + X” — integrating AI into fields such as manufacturing, life sciences, and energy. “Massachusetts can absolutely lead in this next wave,” says Kornbluth. “The ecosystem has the building blocks,” shares Bob Mumgaard SM ’15. “Massachusetts is the strongest in the nation in innovation in energy.”
The Boston Globe’s Tech Power Players list for 2026 features numerous MIT faculty, researchers and alumni. In response to a question about the most promising area in the Boston tech scene right now, President Sally Kornbluth shared: “There isn’t a more important technological field right now than quantum science and technology, and the Boston area has the greatest concentration of quantum talent anywhere in the world.”
Nature reporter Jyoti Madhusoodanan features Prof. Regina Barzilay and Prof. James Collin’s work developing AI tools aimed at accelerating the process of drug discovery and tackling the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Barzilay notes that the goal of AI-based drug design is not to have the perfect method, but to find working solutions to the antibiotic-resistance crisis. “To me, the art is really in taking the tools we currently have, which are already doing quite a bit, and translating them into something which is useful in clinic,” she explains.
Moving Health, a D-Lab spinout founded by MIT students, tackles maternal mortality in rural Ghana by decreasing transport time to hospitals. CNN reporter Maya Baylis highlights how Moving Health’s tricycle ambulances were designed to navigate narrow, rough roads in areas where ambulances are scarce or impractical. “Sometimes the biggest barrier to surviving a medical emergency isn’t the lack of hospitals,” says Emily Young ‘18, CEO and co-founder of Moving Health, “it’s being able to get there in time.”
Sloan Senior lecturer Ben Shields speaks with GBH reporter Rafael Nam about why tickets for the World Cup opening match have not yet sold out. “The hope or bet — for FIFA is that once the matches start — and the greatest players in the world compete for the most prestigious prize of them all, the sport as business lens will fade into the background and the World Cup will be seen and experienced as the enduring global institution that it is,” says Shields.
Prof. David Simchi-Levi speaks with Seb Murray of the Financial Times about how in an effort to increase their supply-chain resilience, companies are increasingly investing in digital tools to map supply chains, identify hidden vulnerabilities across supplier networks and prepare contingency plans. “It’s not enough to use intuition and experience,” Simchi-Levi explains. “You need data and analytics.”
In a series of papers published in the Journal of Plasma Physics, researchers from MIT, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and other universities were able to validate the science and feasibility behind CFS’ plans to build a 400-megawatt fusion power plant, reports Timothy Gardner for Reuters.