Writing for Reuters, Mark Miller explores how robots may soon be used to care for aging members of the population. Miller highlights Professor Cynthia Breazeal’s work developing robots that can make social and emotional connections to people.
“The MIT List Visual Arts Center threw a party Wednesday for artist Joan Jonas, who was chosen recently to represent the United States in its national pavilion at the Venice Biennale,” write Mark Shanahan and Meredith Goldstein for The Boston Globe.
Pedro Nicolaci Da Costa of The Wall Street Journal reports on former Professor Stanley Fischer’s appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. “Mr. Fischer, former chief of the Bank of Israel, is expected to play a leading role helping Chairwoman Janet Yellen forge consensus on the Fed's sometimes-fractious policy committee,” writes Da Costa.
In a piece for Bloomberg News, Tom Moroney highlights the innovative spirit behind the MIT Hobby Shop. “The little-known incubator has spawned hundreds of patented inventions, from a contraption that drops a line of salt around your Margarita to a wheelchair sold worldwide that can move the disabled across the roughest terrain,” Moroney writes.
“The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a hub of genetics research in Kendall Square, will open a new 15-story research tower Wednesday, bringing together hundreds of scientists who previously worked across four scattered locations,” writes Priyanka Dayal McCluskey of The Boston Globe.
Tom Ashbrook speaks with Senior Lecturer Frank Ackerman during this audio segment on NPR’s On Point. Ackerman talks about the importance of putting in place policies that put a price on carbon emissions.
Randy Bean of The Wall Street Journal interviews Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland on the transformational power of big data. “Scientists are discovering that we can begin to explain many things—financial crashes, revolutions, panics—that previously appeared to be random events,” says Pentland.
Forbes reporter Bruce Rogers profiles the work of Professor Tom Leighton, from his days teaching as an MIT professor to his work co-founding Akamai and serving as the company’s CEO.
Hollie Slade of Forbes writes about ProtonMail, a new secure email service started by MIT and Harvard alumni.
Doug Saffir reports for Boston.com on ProtonMail a new, high-security email service started by five alumni of MIT and Harvard. ProtonMail is incorporated in Switzerland and subject to strict governmental privacy protections, features encrypted data, and a self-destruct feature that deletes sent emails.
A new study by researchers from MIT and Harvard shows that emigration may not relieve pressure on weak economies, The Economist reports.
“Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate students aim to create a tool that will be able to more efficiently categorize and index GIFs,” writes Tom House of USA Today about new MIT research that aims to connect language with emotion.
David Barnett of NPR speaks with Professor Tod Machover about the use of technology in modern opera. Machover’s most recent opera, Death and the Powers, tells the story of a man who wants to live forever and downloads himself into a computer consciousness called “The System.”
David Szondy reports on how the MIT Camera Culture Group has developed a new 3-D project system that doesn’t require glasses. Szondy writes that the team sees their system, “as a transitional system that sits between current technologies and true holographic video.”
In a piece for Smithsonian, Randy Rieland writes about how Skylar Tibbits’ Self-Assembly Lab has developed a new technique that could print responsive objects that are able to adapt and transform to their surroundings independently.