For his work developing pricing models, Prof. Stephen Ross has been awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, Reuters reports. The Center for Financial Studies, which awards the prize, said that, "Ross’s models have changed and advanced economic practice profoundly.”
Kevin Hartnett writes for The Boston Globe about “Drawing Apart,” a new exhibition on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The exhibit “deals with the fragmented way distant yet familiar places live on in our imaginations,” explains Hartnett.
Prof. Stephen Ross has won the 2015 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, reports Jack Newsham for The Boston Globe. Jan Pieter Krahnen, director of the Center for Financial Studies, which presents the prize, explains that Ross’ work “has shaped today's thinking in financial innovation, practice, and policy.”
Coco Liu writes for Scientific American about a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that indicates that Chinese government efforts to improve air quality may actually increase carbon emissions. With the focus on air quality, Chinese plants will focus on “scrubbing pollutants from the exhaust stream of coal power plants—rather than switching to use more renewable energy.”
GIFGIF, a project by graduate students Kevin Hu and Travis Rich, maps human emotions by asking people to select which GIFS best represent a specific feeling, reports Jon Christian for Wired. Hu and Rich hope that all of the data collected through GIFGIF “will make it easier to write programs that deal with emotional content.”
Ty Burr reviews Prof. Alan Lightman’s Book “Screening Room” for The Boston Globe. “Lightman bends his nostalgia through the prism of a writer’s creativity the way light through a projector blooms into a story on the screen,” notes Burr.
In an article for The New York Times, Paul Krugman examines how MIT-educated economists came to assume such a prominent position in policy-making today. “Analytically, empirically, the MIT style has had an astonishing triumph,” writes Krugman.
Middle school students from Lincoln County, Maine spent February vacation creating electronics as part of an educational program developed by the Edgerton Center, reports Rob Nesbitt for WCSH-TV. "Normally kids would not be exposed to this level of electronics until, maybe at the earliest, junior year of high school," explains Edgerton instructor Bob Vieth.
Jeffrey Mervis writes for Science that Prof. Marc Kastner will serve as president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a group aimed at boosting support for basic scientific research. Kastner’s new position will allow him to make the case for the importance of basic research on a “national scale.”
Patrick Rishe writes for Forbes about the first day of the 2015 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference, highlighting six of the panel sessions he attended. “My fourth foray at the event, the biggest challenge continues to be finding enough time to attend all the sessions,” Rishe writes.
Charlotte Wilder writes for Boston.com about the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. “Spread over two days in February 2015, the conference features 25 different panel discussions, 8 research paper presentations, 14 talks by invited speakers, a startup competition, a trade show, and a data visualization room.”
Spencer Kelly of BBC News visits the MIT Distributed Robotics Lab to see how researchers have developed software that allows robots to build Ikea furniture. Kelly explains that the goal of the research is to “work towards robots that can work together collaboratively to build complex structures.”
Researchers from MIT and Harvard have identified the optical features within a limpet’s shell that allow the mollusk to display blue stripes, reports Nidhi Subbaraman for BetaBoston. The findings could inspire developments in augmented reality screens.
Peter Shadbolt of CNN reports that MIT researchers have incorporated social networking into clothing, creating a T-shirt that displays the wearer's interests and associations. "We wanted to examine more tangible ways of representing ourselves in social media," explains graduate student Viirj Kan.
Asma Khalid profiles Professor Alan Guth for WBUR's “Visionaries” series, which features experts in a variety of fields. Guth reminisces about how a high school teacher fostered his interest in physics, his time as a student at MIT and his development of the theory behind why the universe expanded so quickly after the Big Bang.