In the Media

President Reif is GeekWire’s Geek of the Week! He talks about what inspires him, his favorite app, and the very “only at MIT” thing he’s waited in line for.  

Musician Miguel Zenón, who postponed a trip to Puerto Rico with the MIT Jazz Ensemble due to Hurricane Maria, will perform two concerts in the U.S., including one at MIT, to benefit the Puerto Rico Recovery Fund. Writing for The Boston Globe, Jon Garelick notes that both shows will feature a new piece commissioned by MIT, “En Pie De Lucha,” which Zenón translates roughly as “getting back up for battle.”

Spencer Buell of Boston Magazine speaks with graduate student Joy Buolamwini, whose research shows that many AI programs are unable to recognize non-white faces. “‘We have blind faith in these systems,’ she says. ‘We risk perpetuating inequality in the guise of machine neutrality if we’re not paying attention.’”

Dropbox, which was co-founded by MIT alumnus Drew Houston ’05, has filed for “its long-awaited initial public offering, which is set to be one of the biggest tech debuts of the past few years,” writes Maureen Farrell and Jay Greene of The Wall Street Journal

Cindy Atoji Keene of The Boston Globe speaks with MIT alumnus Niman Kenkre, who has been a high-stakes professional poker player for 12 years. Crediting his mathematic skills and sense of human psychology for his success, Kenkre says, “a player who relies only on mathematics will miss many important psychological cues relating to player frequencies and tendencies.”

Spun out from MIT, Feature Labs helps companies identify, implement, and deploy impactful machine learning products, writes Ron Miller of TechCrunch. By automating the manual process of feature engineering, data scientists “can spend more time figuring out what they need to predict,” says co-founder Max Kanter ’15.

MIT startup Ministry of Supply has launched an intelligent heated jacket that can operate manually or respond to smart assistants. As Richard Priday of Wired explains, the “optimum temperature of the garment” is calculated using sensors that detect the outside temperature as well as the user’s body movement and temperature.

StandX, a robotic chair developed by MIT research scientist Simon Hong, helps users avoid back pain by nudging its occupant to shift positions, writes Scott Kirsner for The Boston Globe. Hong, who invented the chair to deal with his own back pain, says his is proactive because with others “you can change position, but you do it only when you feel pain."

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has selected Associate Prof. J. Phillip Thompson to serve as his deputy mayor, writes Mara Gay for The Wall Street Journal. De Blasio praised Thompson as “one of the foremost experts on how to better serve and lift up low-income neighborhoods.”

According to a new paper from Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa, “cave drawings may show evidence of the development of spoken human language,” writes Laney Ruckstuhl for The Boston Globe. “There’s this idea that language doesn’t fossilize,” Miyagawa said. “And it’s true, but maybe in these artifacts [cave drawings], we can see some of the beginnings of homo sapiens as symbolic beings.”

Prof. Alex Pentland speaks with Nikolai Kuznetsov of Forbes about Endor, the predictive analytics company he cofounded with Research Affiliate Yaniv Altshuler. “Endor aspires to give average investors and traders an easier time finding equal footing all while lending the investment industry more legitimacy,” said Pentland.

Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Judi Ketteler at the New York Times about how to introduce your children to social media. “Spend some time introducing your child to social media, the same way you introduce them to your neighborhood,” said Turkle. “It is simply now part of parenting.”

Researchers utilized weather data from the region between Texas, North Dakota, and Ohio to see if an increase in crop growth had an effect on area climate change. Kimberly Hickok writes for Science that there is "strong indication" that the regional changes in climate in the late 20^th century can be attributed to “agriculture, and not changing sea surface temperature."

Ministry of Supply, which was founded out of MIT, is launching a new line of “intelligent outerwear” that will feature a jacket that can be warmed from your smartphone. "We think technology should just blend into the background and be simple to use,” cofounder and president Gihan Amarasiriwardena ’11 told Janelle Nanos of the Boston Globe.

Peter Hirst, Assoc. Dean of Executive Education at Sloan, tells Ruth Umoh of CNBC that the best perk you can offer employees is the ability to work from home. “Redesigning how his team works has created motivated and fulfilled employees ‘who are passionate about what they're doing,’” explained Umoh.