Profs. Polina Anikeeva and Feng Zhang are two of the 2018 recipients of the Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise, which are awarded to “young immigrants who have demonstrated exceptional promise early in their careers,” reports Lisa Krieger of The Mercury News.
“Intriguing is that [MIT IQ] brings together researchers who study both human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The hope is that better understanding both of them will help develop new algorithms and techniques that can be used broadly,” writes Sean Captain for Fast Company.
In an article for Salon, Prof. Thomas Kochan writes about what employees would prioritize if they were given the opportunity to participate in discussions about workplace issues. “We found that there are large voice gaps across a range of worker concerns and that they are largest on basic economic issues of compensation and benefits, promotions and job security.”
MIT is launching a new initiative known as MIT Intelligence Quest, “in an effort to combine multiple disciplines to reverse engineer human intelligence, create new algorithms for machine learning and artificial intelligence and foster collaboration,” writes Larry Dignan for ZDNet.
MIT scientists have found that Legos can be used to create a portable, complex microfluidics lab, reports John Biggs of TechCrunch. While the Legos did have to be modified to run fine channels, the precision of the bricks and panels mean “you don’t need much more than a drill and some tubing to prototype a working microfluidics lab,” explains Biggs.
MIT Intelligence Quest, a new Institute-wide initiative that will advance human and machine intelligence research, “will help connect researchers across disciplines and support projects in which they work together, as well as seek collaborations with industry,” writes Andy Rosen for The Boston Globe.
Prof. Josh Tenenbaum spoke with Bob Oakes on WBUR’s Morning Edition about MIT Intelligence Quest. “This is fundamentally about coupling the basic science of how intelligence works in the human mind and brain, with the quest to engineer new more powerful, more humanlike machines. And to do all of this in service of our mission to make a better world, with a longer-term vision that really only a university like MIT can have,” said Tenenbaum.
Writing for Forbes, Frederick Daso describes how MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem helped four students in the Sloan School of Management – Devin Basinger, Yishi Zuo, Derek Hans, and Nikhil Punwaney – launch their startup, DeepBench. MIT Sandbox, The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and The Legatum Center at MIT are among those programs that “provided critical resources they needed to work.”
Jeff Engel writes for Xconomy about MIT’s ambitions for its newly announced Institute-wide initiative, MIT Intelligence Quest. “If we want A.I. breakthroughs, it’s going to take research in new science. That’s a central inspiration for MIT IQ,” said President Reif.
“The MIT Intelligence Quest or MIT IQ, based at an institution that has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence research since the 1950s, is a far-reaching academic effort to regain the initiative in AI,” writes Clive Cookson for The Financial Times.
In an article for the Financial Times, Robin Wigglesworth highlights Profs. Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon’s work with the Billion Prices Project. Wigglesworth notes that the project is an, “example of a broader trend of trawling the swelling sea of big data for clues on how companies, industries or entire economies are performing.”
Speaking to Bloomberg’s Emily Chang and Selina Wang, Lecturer Luis Perez-Breva suggests that fear of AI stems from confusing it with automation. Perez-Breva explains that in his view, “we need to make better businesses that actually use this technology and AI to take advantage of the automation and create new jobs.”
Using recent analyses by Prof. Frank Levy, Eduardo Porter of The New York Times explores the notion that AI will eliminate jobs and negatively impact American politics. Prof. Daron Acemoglu suggests that with more employment options in large cities, the backlash “will be more muted than it was when trade took out the jobs of single-industry company towns.”
Wired reporter Arielle Pardes Gear writes that CSAIL researchers have developed a new system, called ColorFab, that makes it possible to change the color of 3-D printed objects after they have been created. ColorFab allows users to change an object’s color, “by returning to the ColorFab interface, selecting the areas to recolor, and then activating those areas with UV light.”
Prof. Kevin Esvelt speaks with Scientific American reporter Elie Dolgin about his work applying genetic engineering to eradicate diseases like malaria. Esvelt explains that one day researchers could potentially, “engineer an organism that would confer disease resistance to an entire species. Ideally, we’d want to start small and local, see how well it works, and only then scale up if it’s warranted.”