MIT researchers developed a super-thin, bendy material that converts WiFi signals into electricity, reports Ian Sample for The Guardian. “In the future, everything is going to be covered with electronic systems and sensors. The question is going to be how do we power them,” says Prof. Tomás Palacios. “This is the missing building block that we need.”
Prof. Polina Anikeeva speaks with Forbes contributor Poornima Peiris about her work developing materials that could be used to help explore and better understand the brain and nervous system. “I am not interested in just improving things, I want to work on innovative ideas,” says Anikeeva.
TIME reporter Jamie Ducharme highlights how Prof. Dina Katabi has developed a device that uses wireless signals to collect information about how well a person is sleeping. “If we can monitor health continuously but passively in a patient’s natural environment, that can help dramatically,” explains Katabi.
In an article for Axios, Prof. Carlo Rati writes about how developments in automated vehicles and smart infrastructure could be used to help make cities safer. “Developing technology for AVs to communicate with other vehicles as well as infrastructure like streets, traffic lights and road signs could both improve safety and decrease congestion,” writes Ratti.
Associated Press reporter Tali Arbel writes that MIT researchers have found that Amazon’s facial detection technology often misidentifies women and women with darker skin. Arbel writes that the study, “warns of the potential of abuse and threats to privacy and civil liberties from facial-detection technology.”
A new study by Media Lab researchers finds that Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition system performed more accurately when identifying lighter-skinned faces, reports Drew Harrell for The Washington Post. The system “performed flawlessly in predicting the gender of lighter-skinned men,” writes Harrell, “but misidentified the gender of darker-skinned women in roughly 30 percent of their tests.”
Verge reporter James Vincent writes that Media Lab researchers have found that the facial recognition system Rekognition performed worse at identifying an individual’s gender if they were female or dark-skinned. In experiments, the researchers found that the system “mistook women for men 19 percent of the time and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time,” Vincent explains.
WBUR reporter Erin Trahan spotlights a new course that brings together MIT students and inmates at the South Bay House of Correction to create a two-story mural. She speaks with MIT first-year student Sherry Xiao, who explains that she is learning how to collaborate with people, share ideas, and respect other people's ideas.
Writing for Forbes, Jeff Kart highlights how MIT researchers have developed a new technique to process samples of bacteria and gauge whether the bacteria can produce electricity. “The vision is to harness the most-powerful bacteria for tasks like running fuel cells or purifying sewage water,” Kart explains.
Writing for The Conversation, Prof. Thomas Kochan examines how lessons learned from labor negotiations could be applied to resolving the government shutdown. “A skilled labor mediation team would use a strategy that allows each party to hold to their publicly stated commitments and positions while engaging in private off-the-record conversations that actually ignore what they said in public,” Kochan explains.
In an article for The Washington Post, graduate student Sara Plana examines the feasibility of creating a safe zone for civilians in Syria. Plana writes that, “no safe-zone option meets every criterion the United States has for a safe zone at the moment — one that protects the Kurds, requires no U.S. ground troops and avoids confrontation with Turkey.”
Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner highlights the RealityVirtually event that took place at MIT, bringing together nearly 450 people from 35 countries around the world to create new software for virtual and augmented reality headsets. Kirsner writes that the event “offered an incredible glimpse into the nascent medium’s potential and possibilities.”
MIT researchers have found that the Rekognition facial recognition system has more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces than similar services, reports Natasha Singer for The New York Times. Graduate student Joy Buolamwini said “the results of her studies raised fundamental questions for society about whether facial technology should not be used in certain situations,” writes Singer.
Financial Times reporter Andrew Hill spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s Good Jobs Institute, which aims to help companies create good jobs, particularly for service and retail workers. Hill notes that one of Ton’s principles is, “scheduling ‘slack’ into the system so that staff can come up with new ideas and innovations.”
MIT researchers developed a new technique to make a more effective and precise CRISPR gene editing system, reports Eileen Drage O’Reilly for Axios. The system uses the new enzyme Cas12b, which has a “small size and precise targeting [that] will enable it to be used for in vivo applications in primary human cells,” O’Reilly explains.