Vice President for Open Leaning Sanjay Sarma speaks with Jeffrey Young of EdSurge about how the brain works when understanding new concepts. "I question a lot of the structures and dogmas in education that are very closely held, but not necessarily based on science,” says Sarma. “And if we have the courage to reexamine these assumptions and reconstitute education, there's an incredible opportunity to change the game.”
Prof. Dava Newman speaks with WBUR’s Max Larkin about being selected as the new director of the MIT Media Lab. Larkin highlights how Newman, an aerospace engineer and former deputy administrator of NASA, “comes into the role with a stellar resume.” Newman remarks that “superstars and genius come in all forms and shapes.” As director, she says she hopes to celebrate the lab’s “‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations.’”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey writes that Prof. Dava Newman has been selected as the new director of the MIT Media Lab. Coldewey notes that Newman is "starting off the job by emphasizing one of the best qualities a leader should have: listening to the people she’ll be leading.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Berger highlights Superpedestrian, an MIT startup and electric scooter company that secured $60 million in funding. Berger notes that Superpedestrian “spent more than four years designing a vehicle intelligence system that can diagnose and maintain itself.”
Forbes contributor Louis Columbus spotlights Verta, an MIT startup that is “dedicated to solving the complex problems of managing machine learning model versions and providing a platform where they can be launched into production.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Ernest Moniz, the former U.S. Secretary of Energy, underscores the importance of addressing climate change. Moniz calls for providing “as many options and as much flexibility as possible to meet the deep decarbonization goal — and innovation is key. We need as many low- to no-carbon tools as can be developed. This inclusive approach is what will get us to a shared goal of climate risk mitigation the fastest.”
A national survey led by Prof. Charles Stewart III found that Americans generally had smooth experiences voting in the 2020 presidential election, reports Alexa Corse for The Wall Street Journal. Stewart explains that he thinks many voters will continue voting by mail in the future. “I think there will be less reeling back than the rhetoric is suggesting right now,” says Stewart. “State legislatures are going to discover that a lot of the security questions they have are based on exaggerated claims.”
Axios reporter Bryan Walsh spotlights a new study by researchers from MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future that examines the impact of AI on the future of work. Walsh notes that the report’s authors “recommend programs that can enhance computer skills from kindergarten through the university level, while urging businesses and worker organizations to build cushions for the sometimes harsh changes AI will wreak on work.”
Writing for Scientific American, Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, and Greg Tananbaum, director of the Open Research Funders Group, underscore the importance of open science. “We call on universities to emulate MIT and launch an open science task force,” they write. “The MIT model is a true collaboration among the administration, chairs and faculty that includes the development and deployment of open science plans tailored to the disciplinary considerations of each department.”
Noubar Afeyan ’87, a member of the MIT Corporation, speaks with NPR’s Joel Rose about the importance of immigrants and the role of immigration in major scientific advances, including the development of two Covid-19 vaccines. "I think of innovation as a form of intellectual immigration," Afeyan said. "You leave your comforts behind you. You face unrecognizable challenges. You take nothing for granted. You don't feel like in your new country people owe you anything."
MIT researchers have developed a new atomic clock that can keep time more precisely thanks to the use of entangled atoms, reports Leila Stein for Popular Mechanics. “If all atomic clocks worked the way this one does then their timing, over the entire age of the universe, would be less than 100 milliseconds off,” Stein writes.
New York Times reporter David Leonhardt spotlights Prof. Jonathan Gruber and Prof. Simon Johnson’s book, “Jump-Starting America,” which explores how collaboration between the federal government and private companies has led to some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs.
Gizmodo reporter Dharna Noor writes that a new report by MIT researchers finds that U.S. electricity demand could be met with currently available carbon-free technologies. The researchers found that “the best way to move the country to 100% carbon-free energy is to implement a nationwide plan, rather than taking a state-by-state or regional approach.”
Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired. Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Ryosuke Harada highlights a new MIT report that emphasizes the “importance of education and investment in human resources and warns that in the absence of a strategy, jobs will be lost and divisions in society will widen.”