Graduate student Joy Buolamwini is featured on NPR’s TED Radio Hour explaining the racial bias of facial recognition software and how these problems can be rectified. “The minimum thing we can do is actually check for the performance of these systems across groups that we already know have historically been disenfranchised,” says Buolanwini.
Political science graduate student, Michael Freedman writes in The Washington Post about the increased influence of Israel’s religious political parties. Freedman argues that this change is due to the death of powerful moderate political leaders, and warns that it will become “difficult to build a stable coalition that relies on cooperation between secular and religious parties.”
Boston Globe reporter Cate McQuaid spotlights the new works Prof. Judith Barry created for the citywide collaboration, “Art + Tech.” The ICA’s chief curator Eva Respini says that, “Judith is a prescient thinker, working on a cutting edge with digital and video technology.”
MIT researchers have made improvements to liquid-sodium batteries, potentially paving the way for the battery to be used for renewable energy storage, reports Laney Ruckstuhl for The Boston Globe. “Unlike lithium-ion batteries used in cellphones and laptops, the liquid-sodium batteries won’t lose their capacity quickly.”
Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s Vice President for Research, stresses the importance of federal investment in scientific research. “When investments in R & D produce new scientific and technological advances, those advances can in turn spawn new companies and even whole new industries, creating good jobs in a variety of fields,” writes Zuber.
Boston Herald reporter Lindsay Kalter writes that a team of MIT researchers has developed a new technique that can deliver medication to specific regions of the brain with extreme precision. “The whole idea here is that instead of treating the entire brain, you can treat small portions of the brain,” explains Prof. Michael Cima.
In an article co-written for Smithsonian, Prof. John Van Reenen writes about an analysis he and his colleagues conducted examining how socioeconomic background, race and gender can impact a child’s chances of becoming an inventor. The researchers found that, “young people’s exposure to innovators may be an important way to reduce these disparities and increase the number of inventors.”
MIT researchers have discovered a new family of viruses in the ocean that appears to play a key role in ocean ecosystems and could help provide insights on how viruses evolve, reports Marin Finucane for The Boston Globe. Finucane explains that the findings could also lead to, "a better understanding of human biology.”
President L. Rafael Reif speaks with Matthew Campbell of Bloomberg about how the free-flow of talent contributes to America’s success as a leader in innovation. “We’ve been so lucky over the years that the best in the world have wanted to come to the U.S. If all of a sudden we don’t have the MITs because no talent comes, America will hurt.”
MIT researchers have designed a new chip that could advance the development of computers that operate like the human brain, reports James Vincent for The Verge. The development could, “lead to processors that run machine learning tasks with lower energy demands — up to 1,000 times less. This would enable us to give more devices AI abilities like voice and image recognition.”
AP reporter Lauran Neergaard writes that MIT researchers have developed a hair-thin implant that can deliver medications to specific regions of the brain. Neergaard writes that the device, “could mark a new approach to treating brain diseases — potentially reducing side effects by targeting only the hard-to-reach circuits that need care.”
Tony Lee of Mashable spotlights the technique developed by MIT researchers that allows plants to glow when inserted with nanoparticles containing luciferase, an enzyme known to make fireflies glow.
STAT reporter Dominic Smith highlights how MIT researchers are applying the art of origami to developing a new way to deliver cancer medications. Prof. Michael Cima explains that, “the idea here was, is there a way we could do a minimally invasive procedure to deploy some sort of device that will deliver the drug over that entire course of the therapy?”
MIT researchers are stress-testing AI systems by tricking them into misidentifying images, writes Dana Smith of Scientific American. Graduate student Anish Athalye notes that some neural nets are outperforming humans, “but they have this weird property that it seems that we can trick them pretty easily.”
Wired reporter Sandy Ong highlights the work of Prof. Suranga Nanayakkara, who as a postdoc at MIT helped develop the Finger Reader, a device aimed at helping people with visual impairments read without the need for clunky hardware. The Finger Reader, “lets people read only what they’re pointing at, promising a relatively fuss-free experience, especially when out and about.”