In the Media

NPR’s Joe Palca reports on MIT Professor Rohit Karnik’s work to develop a cheap and effective way to filter water. Karnik’s new solution is a filter made from a pinewood branch peeled of its bark.

“To explore this new world where governments and companies have the ability to amass, analyze and use vast amounts of personal information, the president ordered a comprehensive review of what’s called ‘big data’,” wrote WBUR reporter Bruce Gellerman of the big data privacy workshop held at MIT March 3.

Boston Globe reporter Carolyn Johnson writes that Professor Rohit Karnik has developed a, “promising next-generation water filter that might be effective, cheap, and biodegradable.”

MIT Professor Paul Berinsky talks to NPR about Mechanical Turk and how the site can be useful for academic research.  Using the service has allowed researchers to save time and money, while providing users the opportunity to be creative, Berinsky tells NPR.

“As the opening speaker at a workshop titled Big Data Privacy, sponsored by M.I.T. and the White House, Dr. Reif framed some of the big questions that have arisen from the increasing public and private sector use of powerful large-scale data-mining techniques,” writes Natasha Singer for The New York Times.

"Government, business and academic leaders gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Monday to discuss whether new policies are needed to regulate the use of big data, the large and complex sets of electronic information being used by companies to market products, researchers to study health problems, and as a government surveillance tool," writes Associated Press reporter Paige Sutherland of the big data privacy workshop held at MIT.

Steve Henn reports for NPR on protecting privacy in the digital age in advance of the big data privacy workshop co-hosted by MIT and the White House.

The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen profiles MIT alumna Radia Perlman in the first installment of a new series on pioneering women in science and technology. Rosen discusses Perlman’s early interest in science, her first introduction to programming and her time at MIT.

A new programming language with built-in privacy protocols could help prevent your personal information from being compromised, reports Klint Fliney for Wired. The system, dubbed Jeeves, was developed by MIT PhD student Jean Yang.

“Now, researchers at MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., and the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (UPMC), in Paris, are teasing out the physics of curly hair,” writes Denise Chow of new MIT research to understand why and how hair curls.

“The function of xylem's filtration formed the basis of a paper published this week by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” Jason Tetro writes of Rohit Karnik’s work with water filtration in the Huffington Post. “The premise was that xylem could help to filter water and make it safe to drink.”

On Morning Joe, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker discusses the goal of the big data privacy workshop the White House co-hosted with MIT on March 3rd.

New York Times reporter Gina Kolata examines a new MIT study that uncovered a rare mutation that protects people from getting Type 2 diabetes. The findings could be applied to developing a drug that mimics how the mutation operates, Kolata writes.

American Society of Mechanical Engineers reporter Nancy S. Giges features research by MIT Professor Thomas Peacock that could help predict where ocean pollutants will come ashore. Peacock’s research could be useful in coordinating better disaster response, according to Giges.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method to diagnosis cancer, writes Liat Clark in Wired. The new technique, which identifies proteins in urine associated with cancer, works like a pregnancy test and could be used to improve cancer care in developing nations, Clark reports.