Graduate student Joy Buolamwini has been named to the Financial Times’ list of change-makers, which highlights “30 of the planet’s most exciting young people.” Financial Times reporter India Ross notes that Buolamwini, “identified gender and racial biases in artificial intelligence, and her efforts have prompted technology companies such as IBM to upgrade their software accordingly.”
Prof. Larry Susskind speaks with WGBH’s Arun Rath about how public agencies can prepare for ransomware attacks. “When Microsoft sends your city agency a patch on your operating system, you should install it,” says Susskind, “because not installing it means that one place of vulnerability is known by all the hackers everywhere.”
MIT researchers have developed a robot with an extendible appendage that grows like a plant, reports Darrell Etherington for TechCrunch. The robot can “extend itself to reach up to a previously unreachable height, or through a gap to a hard-to-get-at area."
CNN reporter Peter Valdes-Dapena writes that researchers from MIT and Lamborghini have created a new material that could allow the “creation of supercapacitors capable of holding two to three times as much energy as the supercapacitors now being produced.”
Financial Times reporter Charlotte Middlehurst spotlights how a team of engineers, including researchers from MIT, have found “AI can be used to measure the useful lifetime of lithium-ion battery-powered devices.” Middlehurst explains that this could “spur improved battery design and reduce production costs.”
Houston Chronicle reporter James Orborne writes that MIT researchers have found that decarbonizing the power grid would be less costly if nuclear power, along with renewable sources, could be expanded. The researchers note that, "Continued focus on lowering the cost of baseload generation from low-carbon sources such as nuclear would make achieving deep reductions in carbon emissions much less costly."
Prof. Danielle Wood speaks with Living Lab Radio about the need to treat space as a national park or world heritage site so that it can be used for the benefit of all. “Space is truly a global location,” says Wood. “Ideally, you could see distributions of benefit to people around the world--benefiting from both the services of space and activities in space.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, William Meyers explores the new exhibition exploring the history of Polaroid photography at the MIT Museum. Meyers writes that the exhibit “shows us just how fertile Edwin Land’s invention proved to be for decades of artists.”
In this video, USA Today spotlights how CSAIL researchers have developed a set of robotic cubes that are able to jump in the air and climb over and around each other. The researchers hope that in the future the cubes could be used in disaster-response situations, such as to “build a temporary staircase in a burning building.”
Researchers from MIT’s Senseable City Lab have developed an index measuring tree cover in a number of cities around the world, reports Oliver Balch for The Guardian. Balch notes that, “one of the main motivations behind the MIT ranking was to ascertain how trees help mitigate the so-called heat island effect in cities.”
Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner writes that a new study by researchers from MIT and the Bipartisan Policy Center finds that voters in communities with greater minority and low-income populations tended to experience longer wait times in the 2018 midterm elections. The study presents the data as a prescriptive opportunity for election administrators to improve wait times by understanding when and where they occur,” Gardner explains.
MIT researchers have developed a new navigation system that could enable autonomous delivery roots to find the location of a front door without being provided a specific map in advance, reports Darrell Etherington for TechCrunch. The system allows a robot to process “cues in its surroundings on the fly to figure out a front door’s location,” Etherington explains.
Astronomers have compared the data from the journeys Voyager 1 and 2 made into interstellar space and found that Voyager 1 entered a region where the movement of plasma stagnated, reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for Scientific American. “Essentially the plasma was just sitting there,” explains John Richardson of MIT Kavli.
Scientific American spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new control method that enables a two-legged human-controlled robot to maintain its balance while responding quickly to the operator’s movements. The robot, which is dubbed Little HERMES, “combines the strength and resilience of a robot with the knowledge and adaptability of a human.”
A new FRONTLINE documentary spotlights Prof. Regina Barzilay’s work developing an AI system that can aid the detection of breast cancer. “A technology that had not yet penetrated the hospital setting now has the potential to save many thousands of lives each year,” writes Patrice Taddonio for PBS.