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In the Media

Displaying 15 news clips on page 3

The Wall Street Journal

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, and Jeffrey Proudfoot, a research affiliate with Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, make the case that while board members are increasingly being tasked with a company’s cybersecurity strategy, they are often not prepared to deal with attacks. “With the increasing mandate on boards to serve as the strategic cybersecurity guards of their companies, more needs to be done to guard the guards themselves,” they write.

TechCrunch

Reflex Robotics, a startup co-founded by several MIT alumni, has developed a remotely-operated humanoid robot capable of handling tasks such as grabbing an item off a shelf, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. The robot’s hardware “is an in-house design, featuring a ‘torso’ mounted to a base that allows the arms and sensors to dynamically move up and down,” explains Heater. “It makes for a surprisingly dexterous robot that can access shelves at a variety of heights, while maneuvering tight spaces. The system has a wheeled base, which is perfectly effective for navigating these kinds of layouts.”

TechCrunch

Birago Jones SM '12 and Karthik Dinakar SM '12, PhD '17 co-founded Pienso – an AI platform that “lets users build and deploy models without having to write code,” reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Pienso’s flexible, no-code interface allows teams to train models directly using their own company’s data,” says Jones. “This alleviates the privacy concerns of using … models, and also is more accurate, capturing the nuances of each individual company.”

The Boston Globe

Paris Smalls PhD '22 founded Eden GeoPower – a startup that uses “a new kind of fracking that uses jolts of electricity, rather than blasts of water, to shatter underground rocks,” reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “While the process can work for extracting oil and natural gas, Smalls mainly wants to tap into a squeaky-clean energy source — the natural heat of the planet’s crust,” writes Bray.

TechCrunch

Prof. Mike Stonebraker co-founded DBOS, a serverless software platform, that aims to “put a database system at the bottom of the technology stack as close to the bare metal as possible where the operating system usually sits,” reports Ron Miller for TechCrunch. “Bare metal is a term used to describe the pure hardware layer where no software exists. Flipping the OS and the database is a bold and revolutionary idea,” explains Miller.

Axios

MIT’s new Climate Policy Center, directed by Prof. Christopher Knittel, will aim to produce “policy-relevant research on shorter timescales, while also pursuing more typical, long-term peer-reviewed work,” reports Andrew Freeman for Axios.

NPR

Prof. Arnold Barnett speaks with NPR reporter Juliana Kim about airline safety and the risks associated with flying. According to Barnett, "from 2018 to 2022, the chances of a passenger being killed on a flight anywhere in the world was 1 in 13.4 million. Between 1968 to 1977, the chance was 1 in 350,000,” writes Kim.

Reuters

Will Dunham at Reuters writes about new research from Prof. Evelina Fedorenko and others, which found that polyglots “who spoke between five and 54 languages” used less brain activity when processing their native language. "We think this is because when you process a language that you know well, you can engage the full suite of linguistic operations - the operations that the language system in your brain supports," says Fedorenko.

Poets & Quants for Executives

Prof. Thomas Malone speaks with Poets & Quants for Executives reporter Alison Damast about the executive education course he teaches with Prof. Daniela Rus that aims to provide senior-level managers with a better sense of how AI works. “We are certainly not trying to teach people to understand the details of how to write AI programs, though some of those in the course may know that already,” Malone says. “What we are trying to do is give them a sense of when it is easy and when it is hard to use AI technology at various times for different kinds of business applications.”

Boston Herald

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere are investigating the “pathways, risk factors, and molecules” involved in the development of colorectal cancer, reports Rick Sobey for The Boston Herald. “The research team has uncovered contributing causes to this rise in early-onset cases, including: overweight/obesity, physical inactivity, poor diet, and alterations in the gut microbiome,” writes Sobey.

Fast Company

Research Scientist Eva Ponce speaks with Fast Company to explain how AI will impact supply chains. “One of the most common reasons I have seen companies fail when implementing disruptive technologies like AI is when they are rushing, with a lack of clear vision,” says Ponce.

Mashable

Mashable reporter Adele Walton spotlights Joy Buolamwini PhD '22 and her work in uncovering racial bias in digital technology. “Buolamwini created what she called the Aspire Mirror, which used face-tracking software to register the movements of the user and overlay them onto an aspirational figure,” explains Walton. “When she realised the facial recognition wouldn’t detect her until she was holding a white mask over her face, she was confronted face on with what she termed the ‘coded gaze.’ She soon founded the Algorithmic Justice League, which exists to prevent AI harms and increase accountability.”

The Guardian

In an article for The Guardian, Angela Saini, an instructor in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, details her research studying the origins of the patriarchy. “Anthropologists have documented at least 160 matrilineal societies still in existence today, in which people trace their lineage through the women in their family rather than the men,” explains Saini. “There is an entire ‘matrilineal belt’ that stretches across Africa, and others dotted across Asia and North and South America.”

Scientific American

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, postdoc Rohan Naidu will be studying “some of the particularly large and red galaxies, [called little red dots,] that appear much brighter and more massive than theorists have expected galaxies at this epoch to be,” reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for Scientific American. Naidu’s “program will seek to settle the debat about little red dots once and for all,” writes O’Callaghan.

New Scientist

MIT scientists have found that a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease involving flickering lights and low-pitched sound could also help prevent cognitive problems after cancer treatment, reports Clare Wilson for New Scientist. The treatment is aimed at stimulating 40 Hz brainwaves, which are linked to memory processing. The results suggest targeting such “brainwaves may result in broader benefits for the brain, including increasing the activity of immune cells and, most recently, boosting its drainage system, which could help clear a toxic protein called beta-amyloid.”