In the Media

A new learning program developed by researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto imitates the way humans learn, according to EFE. The researchers aim to “reduce the difference in learning capability between humans and machines.”

Researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto have created a learning program that can grasp new concepts just like humans do, reports Will Dunham for Reuters. “Judges found the work produced by the computers to be virtually indistinguishable from that of human subjects,” explains Dunham. 

A study conducted by Prof. Esther Duflo found that when women were offered financial support through livestock and educational training, they were able to climb out of poverty, according to The Economist. “Seven years after the programme began their average monthly consumption was almost one-third higher than it had been after two years.”

A new advance in machine learning allows a computer program to recognize and draw handwritten characters based off a few examples, reports John Markoff for The New York Times.  Markoff explains that the “improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life.”

Joel Achenbach reports for The Washington Post on the new program developed by researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto that can learn by example, a characteristic of human learning. Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum explains that the new system has made “a significant advance in capturing the way that people are thinking about these concepts.”

Bryanna Cappadona reports for Boston.com that Matt Damon will be MIT’s 2016 commencement speaker. “Damon joins a long list of notable MIT commencement speakers, including U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith in 2015, DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman in 2014, and Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston in 2013,” writes Cappadona.

BetaBoston reporter Elizabeth Preston writes that MIT graduate students are explaining complex aerospace engineering topics to a class of fifth grader students in Georgia. Teacher Alana Davis says of the MIT students that, “I don’t think they realize what a difference they’re making in these kids’ lives.” 

Los Angeles Times reporter Amina Khan writes that researchers have developed a program that learns to recognize and draw handwritten characters based off a few examples. Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum explains that the system, “can learn a large class of visual concepts in ways that are hard to distinguish from human learners.” 

Actor and Cambridge native Matt Damon will speak at MIT’s 2016 commencement, writes Steve Annear for The Boston Globe. In addition to his success in Hollywood, Annear writes that Damon “is one of the founders of Water.org, a non-profit dedicated to delivering access to clean drinking water in developing countries.”

Academy Award-winning actor, filmmaker and social activist Matt Damon will deliver the 2016 commencement address at MIT, reports the Associated Press. 

Kelly Servick writes for Science about Prof. Rosalind Picard’s work developing wearable technology that monitors and manages a user’s stress levels. “It’s one thing to study all this,” says Picard. “It’s another to build it into a form that people can start changing their lives around.”

Hilary Brueck writes for Fortune that researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto have developed a new technique that allows machines to learn in a more human-like manner. The new technique “comes one step closer to getting machines to learn new things in a one-shot manner, more like humans do.”

Researchers have developed a learning program that can recognize handwritten characters after seeing only a few examples, reports Emily Chung for CBC News. The program “could lead to computers that are much better at speech recognition — especially recognizing uncommon words — or classifying objects and behaviour for businesses or the military.”

A new study from MIT’s Industrial Performance Center finds that while Massachusetts is successfully launching and growing new startups, the state has a shortage of “super-scale” companies, reports Hiawatha Bray for BetaBoston. Bray explains that the report “calls for public- and private-sector efforts to foster the development of bigger businesses in the Bay State.”

MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that can predict household income in urban areas based off of Google Street View images, writes Bourree Lam for The Atlantic. The algorithm "explains 77 percent of the variation in income at the block-group level,” explains graduate student Nikhil Naik.