In the Media

Gloria L. Fox, the longest-serving Black woman representative in the Massachusetts Legislature who completed the MIT Community Fellows program, has died at the age of 82, reports Tiana Woodard for The Boston Globe. Fox is remembered as a “superwoman, a legend, and a lifelong advocate of Boston’s black communities,” writes Woodard. “Fox held the seat, representing parts of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mission Hill, and the Fenway for more than 30 years… she championed legislation that addressed health disparities, foster care, criminal justice, and disinvestment, no matter what opposition she faced.” 

Alex Oliva '16, MEng '18 will be touring the country with “Nutcracker! Magical Christmas Ballet” as an acrobat/aerialist, “spinning across the stage inside a 73-inch Cyr wheel,” reports Cate McQuaid for The Boston Globe. “It’s a very simple device, just a circle,” says Oliva. “The laws of physics govern the movement of it the same way that you can spin a coin.”

New Yorker reporter Rivka Galchen visits the lab of Prof. Hugh Herr to learn more about his work aimed at the “merging of body and machine.” Herr and his team are developing bionic prosthetics that can be completely controlled by the human brain and are designed to allow users “to walk approximately as quickly and unthinkingly as anyone else.”  Herr imagines a future where “we will be able to sculpt our own brains and bodies, and therefore our own identities and experiences.”

Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of dynamic gastric balloon that inflates on demand and could be used to help patients feel more full before meals, reports Margherita Bassi for Gizmodo. The engineers have “designed a potential future alternative for patients who, for any number of reasons, cannot treat obesity through medications or invasive surgeries such as gastric bypass surgery or stapling,” writes Bassi. 

Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Anant Agarwal shares AI’s potential to “revolutionize education by enhancing paths to individual students in ways we never thought possible.” Agarwal emphasizes: “A.I. will never replace the human touch that is so vital to education. No algorithm can replicate the empathy, creativity and passion a teacher brings to the classroom. But A.I. can certainly amplify those qualities. It can be our co-pilot, our chief of staff helping us extend our reach and improve our effectiveness.”

Boston Globe reporter Malcom Gay spotlights the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, a “new hub for music instruction and performance” for MIT’s 30 on-campus ensembles and more than 1,500 students enrolled in music classes each academic year. Gay notes that: “The more than 35,000-square-foot structure offers a variety of classroom, performance, rehearsal, and studio spaces.” He adds that there will be “more than 25 concerts at Tull Concert Hall that are open to the public this spring.”

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.” 

Lisa Su '90, SM '91, PhD '94, chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, 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.”

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. 

In an interview with Boston Public Radio, Prof. Jon Gruber explains the expected impact of incoming tariff proposals, reports Hannah Loss for GBH. “There is a growing consensus that economic nationalism is something worth taking seriously, in particular for sectors where we are very vulnerable to supply chains and where we have concerns that other countries might not trade fairly,” says Gruber. 

Forbes reporter Tom Teicholz spotlights the artistic work of alumna Lauren Bon. “Over the last two decades, as part of her art practice, Bon has undertaken projects that involve an exploration of urban natural resources in ways that have a positive environmental and societal impact,” writes Teicholz. 

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.” 

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.”

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." 

Professor Giovanni Traverso and his colleagues have developed a new gastric balloon that can be inflated and deflated to mimic feeling full. Unlike traditional gastric balloons, which are one size, the new version is “connected to an external control device that can be attached to the skin and contains a pump that inflates and deflates the balloon when needed,” writes Ernie Mundell for HealthDay.