In the Media

Colleen Shalby reports for the PBS NewHour on the “visual microphone” developed by MIT researchers that can detect and reconstruct audio by analyzing the sound waves traveling through objects. 

Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Drake Bennett writes about how MIT researchers have developed a technique for extracting audio by analyzing the sound vibrations traveling through objects. Bennett reports that the researchers found that sound waves could be detected even when using cell phone camera sensors. 

Alyssa Newcomb of ABC News reports on how MIT researchers have developed a new method that can uncover intelligible audio by videotaping everyday objects and translating the sound vibrations back into intelligible sound. 

Dan Kadlec reports for TIME on new research from Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, which shows that grandparents can play an important role in teachning their grandchildren about the importance of saving money.“Life has gotten very busy for dual income households,” Coughlin says. “Grandparents can fill in the gaps. They have the time and the stories to tell.”

“[A]s an educational researcher, I believe that MIT has captured, perhaps uniquely, both the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for colleges and universities,” writes Dan Butin for The Huffington Post about a new report released by the MIT Task Force on the Future of MIT Education.

Professor Noam Chomsky reflects in The Huffington Post on the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the age of nuclear weapons. Chomsky argues that, considering their tremendous capacity for destruction, it is only by luck that we have survived with nuclear weapons for so long.

NPR’s Melissa Block examines the new MIT algorithm that can translate visual information into sound. Abe Davis explains that by analyzing sound waves traveling through an object, “you can start to filter out some of that noise and you can actually recover the sound that produced that motion.” 

Time reporter Nolan Feeney writes about how researchers from MIT have developed a new technique to extract intelligible audio of speech by “videotaping and analyzing the tiny vibrations of objects.”

Writing for The Washington Post, Hunter Schwartz reports on new findings concerning municipal governments from Professor Chris Warshaw. Schwartz writes that the study found, “Even cities with governments designed to be less partisan, with institutions like nonpartisan elections and professional managers instead of elected mayors, are in line with residents’ political beliefs.”

In a piece for USA Today, Mark Olalde reports on a new study of municipal politics co-written by MIT Professor Chris Warshaw. Through the study, which examined the political preferences of U.S. residents in specific cities, Warshaw found that Mesa, Arizona was the most conservative city and San Francisco, California the most liberal. 

Jeffrey R. Young writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education about the final report released by the Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education. Speaking of the Task Force’s recommendation to make education more modular, co-chair Sanjay Sarma says, “we see modularity becoming a key part of on-campus experiences as well.”

Bloomberg News reporter Kelly Blessing writes about the final report produced by the Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education. “The Task Force encourages MIT to evaluate possibilities to achieve increases in undergraduate class size so that more students can experience the rich magic of an MIT residential education,” the Task Force wrote in their report. 

“Researchers have developed an algorithm that can use visual signals from videos to reconstruct sound and have used it to recover intelligible speech from a video,” writes Katie Collins for Wired about an algorithm developed by a team of MIT researchers that can derive speech from material vibrations.

Lisa Kiplinger writes for USA Today about research from Dr. Joseph Coughlin, director of the the MIT AgeLab, that indicates that 85 percent of Millennials are open to having conversations about finances with their grandparents, but only 8 percent of grandparents are likely to initiate the conversation.

WBUR’s Bruce Gellerman reports on MIT.nano, the nanotechnology research facility that when completed will provide cutting-edge laboratory space for thousands of researchers. “The world is built on nanoscale and the 21st century will be defined by it,” says Prof. Vladimir Bulovic.