Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, and Luke Bryant Yoquinto, a research associate at the AgeLab, write for The Washington Post about how patchwork social distancing regulations in certain areas of the U.S. have put vulnerable populations at risk. “Any policy that puts the people most susceptible to the virus at risk puts us all at risk,” they write.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Emil Verner underscores how public health measures to slow the spread of Covid-19 can aid economic recovery. “This shouldn’t be seen as a choice between saving lives and saving the economy,” writes Verner. “It’s clear that well-calibrated public health interventions are the most beneficial way to protect our health and the health of our economy.”
Professors Sabine Iatridou, Jonathan Gruber and Rebecca Saxe have been honored with Guggenheim fellowships, reports Diti Kohli for The Boston Globe. Kohli notes that “since 1925, the fellowship has bestowed more than $375 million to enable honorees ‘engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts.’”
Washington Post reporter Erin Blakemore explores how MIT researchers have transformed the spike-like proteins of the coronavirus into a musical composition, which could be used to help identify new treatments. The researchers hope the “protein-generated music could be used as an alternate way to visualize the complexity of proteins, and eventually find places to target with drugs.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Visiting Lecturer Irving Wladawsky-Berger highlights how the MIT Connection Science group is using anonymous geolocation data from digital devices to analyze the impact of social distancing measures in New York. The researchers found “social distancing policies have led to major changes in where people spend their time and how they interact with each other.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Yossi Sheffi about how governments can address shortages of health-care equipment. “The U.S. must keep a very large, centrally-managed inventory of health-care supplies in several locations around the country to supplement the inventory maintained at each hospital,” says Sheffi. “The parallel here is the strategic oil reserves.”
Scientific American reporter Wade Roush spotlights The Engine as “one bright spot in the world of tech investing.” Ann DeWitt, a general partner at The Engine notes that the researchers The Engine tends to work with are “compelled into entrepreneurship because of what they're trying to achieve.”
Professors Simon Johnson and Retsef Levi writes for The Boston Globe about how the U.S. can prepare to safely reopen the American economy without reigniting another wave of Covid-19 infections. “We must start to build the information and response systems necessary to sustain a different public health strategy: targeted social distancing,” they write.
Washington Post reporter Cat Zakrzewski spotlights how MIT researchers are developing a system that uses smartphone Bluetooth signals to track the spread of Covid-19 while protecting privacy. “Our effort is designed to show that there is a privacy preserving way of doing this kind of automated contact tracing,” explains Principal Research Scientist Daniel Weitzner.
Researchers from MIT, MGH and other institutions are developing a system that automates contact tracing for Covid-19 using smartphone Bluetooth signals while preserving user privacy, reports Zeninjor Enwemeka for WBUR. "It's got to be part of a public health strategy," says Principal Research Scientist Daniel Weitzner of the system. "We're developing this as a tool that we hope can be useful to that process."
Fast Company reporter Katharine Schwab writes that researchers from MIT are building a system that uses random identifiers emitted by smartphone Bluetooth signals to help track the spread of Covid-19. “Instead of an eye in the sky that watches everybody, we want to have the phones that people are carrying around tell how close they’ve been to other people,” says Prof. Ron Rivest.
A new contact tracing method developed by MIT researchers uses Bluetooth signals emitted by smartphones to trace the spread of Covid-19 while maintaining privacy, reports Darrell Etherington for TechCrunch. Etherington notes that, “MIT’s system sidesteps entirely many of the thorniest privacy-related issues around contact tracing.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Agam Shah spotlights the MIT Covid-19 Challenge’s Beat the Pandemic virtual hackathon, which brought together 1,500 participants working in 238 teams. During the hackathon, MIT provided participants with “access to open data sets including JHU’s epidemiological data repository and Covid-19 information compiled by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.”
During an interview with David Brancaccio of Marketplace, Prof. Esther Duflo advocates for providing direct cash transfers to help the poor during the Covid-19 pandemic. “There is no trade off in poor countries between helping people sustain themselves financially and getting the health conditions to improve; the two have to go hand in hand,” says Duflo.
MIT researchers have developed a new website aimed at K-12 students aimed at helping them learn more about artificial intelligence, reports Mark Wilson for Fast Company. “The site provides 60 activities, lesson plans, and links to interactive AI experiments that MIT and companies like Google have developed in the past,” writes Wilson.