Researchers from MIT and Harvard have found that “companies’ reliance on disclosing adjusted earnings or other figures not consistent with generally accepted accounting principles has made it more difficult for investors to forecast performance, putting them at greater risk than they may realize,” reports Mark Maurer for The Wall Street Journal.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Stuart Madnick examines the ethical challenges posed by new AI technologies. “Ethical decisions are indeed hard, and AI will increasingly raise these dilemmas,” writes Madnick. “The dialogue on these matters must be started now, by creators of the science, by business leaders responsible for its uses, and by society which will have to live with the consequences.”
Fast Company reporter Lara Sorokanich spotlights how Prof. of the Practice Zeynep Ton’s work is focused on working with employers to improve the quality of jobs. Sorokanich writes that Ton “cites increasing minimum-wage laws and improved pay at Walmart, Target, and Amazon as signs of the sea change to come—but they’re just the first steps in what she considers a crucial overhaul of low-wage-workers’ conditions.”
TechCrunch reporter Darrell Etherington writes that MIT researchers have developed a new way to speed up the planning process involved in a robot grasping an object. The new technique reduces the “total time from as much as 10 or more minutes to less than a second,” Etherington explains. “That’s many orders of magnitude better.”
Gizmodo visits Prof. Joseph Paradiso to learn more about the giant modular synthesizer he created. “One of the beautiful things about modular synths, I think, is they don’t do anything when you turn them on,” says Paradiso. “It forces you to be creative, to really try to think of something new because you are starting with nothing.”
Boston Globe reporter Maria Lovato writes that MIT researchers used a large galaxy cluster to see the X-rays emitted by a galaxy 9.4 billion light-years away. “Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory,” writes Lovato, “the astronomers studied the Phoenix galaxy cluster 5.7 billion light-years away and were able to see the young galaxy hidden billions of light-years behind it.”
MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm that can accurately identify actions in video while consuming a small fraction of the processing power previously required, reports Will Knight for Wired. “The work is a step towards having AI recognize what’s happening in video, perhaps helping to tame the vast amounts now being generated,” Knight explains.
WBUR’s Pamela Reynolds spotlights Alicja Kwade’s new exhibit on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. “I think she is fundamentally interested in the existence of alternate realities or systems and makes these artworks that expose the constructed nature of our reality,” says Henriette Huldisch, director of exhibitions and curator at the List.
Forbes reporter Charles Towers-Clark writes that two new papers by CSAIL researchers demonstrate that “current verification and detection systems are not sufficient to stop the swathes of false information that are currently plaguing media of all kinds.”
CNN reporter Ashley Strickland writes that MIT researchers built a scale model to test the stability of Leonardo da Vinci’s design for a bridge to span the cities of Galata and Istanbul. “What we can learn from Leonardo da Vinci's design is that the form of a structure is very important for its stability," explains MIT alumnus Karly Bast.
MIT researchers have found that machine learning systems are not able to identify whether news articles are true or false yet, reports Joe Uchill for Axios. Uchill explains that the researchers found “machine-learning systems do a good job detecting stories that were machine-written, but not at separating the true ones from the false ones.”
BBC News reporter Soutik Biswas writes about the work of two of the 2019 Nobel laureates in economics, Prof. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who were honored for their efforts to alleviate global poverty. The researchers “believe there are no magic bullets to end poverty. Instead, there are a number of things which could help improve their lives: a simple piece of information can make a big difference.”
Axios reporter Jacob Knutson writes that MIT Professors Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee were two of this year’s recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their work introducing a “new approach to addressing global poverty by dividing the issue into more manageable questions.”
A Mighty Girl profiles the work of Prof. Esther Duflo, the second woman and the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Duflo and her fellow laureates, “have helped millions of people around the world with their research to develop practical interventions to alleviating global poverty,” notes A Mighty Girl.
Profs. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee speak with Radio Boston about winning the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Poverty is "a number of problems,” explains Duflo. “Once you start thinking about all of these problems one at a time, you can apply much more rigor and a much more scientific approach to address them.”