In the Media

Boston Globe reporter Adri Pray spotlights the Women Take the Reel Film Festival, an annual celebration of female filmmakers that “features themes of gender, sexuality, race, feminism, and class.”

Christina “Chris” Birch PhD '15 is among NASA’s newest class of astronauts, reports Norah O’Donnell for CBS Evening News. “These new astronauts could one day be part of the team that brings the first woman and first person of color to the surface of the moon and beyond.”

MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese speaks with CNBC about how the new class of weight loss drugs will impact American taxes and the federal deficit. “These drugs could touch tens of millions of Americans, that’s the good news,” says Deese. “They have the potential to reduce obesity, address diabetes and reduce the health care costs associated with that. The problem is that the scale and the cost of these drugs is so large, that it could add enormously to the federal budget.”

Prof. Edward Roberts, one of the area’s “most influential pioneers in entrepreneurship” known for his work “encouraging startups and increasing MIT’s role in the tech industry ecosystem,” has died at 88, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “There’s this narrative that you’re born to be an entrepreneur, and he did this research and debunked that,” explains Prof. Bill Aulet. “It’s impossible to go into entrepreneurship, especially in Boston, but even globally, without finding his influences.”

Wardah Inam SM '12, PhD '16 founded Overjet, an AI platform that helps dentists “diagnose diseases from scans and other data,” reports Saritha Rai for Bloomberg. “Dentistry was more art than science, and I wanted to bring technology and AI to help dentists make objective decisions,” says Inam. “We began building and then improving our AI systems with tens of millions of pieces of data, including X-rays, historical information, dentist notes, and periodontal charts.”

Prof. Catherine Wolfram speaks with Heatmap reporter Matthew Zeitlin about her new study examining the effectiveness of climate policies in reducing emissions. Wolfram and her colleague found that instituting a carbon fee and a clean electricity standard would reduce emissions the most. Wolfram added that if the U.S. were to institute a carbon fee, it would be a major step towards a worldwide carbon price. “The more countries that get in this game,” Wolfram said, “the more powerful that policy can be.”

Senior Lecturer Luis Videgaray speaks with Government Technology reporter Nikki Davidson about concerns facing emerging AI programs and initiatives. Videgaray underscores the importance of finding vendors, "who are willing to protect the data in a way that is appropriate and also provides the state or local government agency with the required degree of transparency about the workings of the model, the data that was used for training and how that data will interact with the data supplied by the customer.”

A new study by Prof. Joseph Weber and his colleagues “attempts to understand how financial statement auditors detect, resolve, and deal with the aftermath of material misstatements (MMs) in companies’ financial statements,” reports Joseph Brazel for Forbes. 

Prof. Philip Isola and Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speak with Associated Press reporter Matt O’Brien about AI generated images and videos. Rus says the computing resources required for AI video generation are “significantly higher than for still image generation” because “it involves processing and generating multiple frames for each second of video.”

Boston Globe reporter Michael Silverman spotlights the 18^th MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference focused on a, “diverse array of heady topics such as artificial intelligence, the globalization of soccer, the next phase of sports ownership, the evolutional of poker strategy,” writes Silverman, noting that “nearly every conversation on stage seemed to circle back to a shared belief that the momentum already carrying women’s sports is on the verge of a new surge.”

Prof. Jonathan Gruber, MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese and Stanford doctoral student Ryan Cummings write for The New York Times about the health benefits of new weight-loss drugs and the risk they pose to American taxpayers. “The magnitude of potential benefit and potential cost — roughly $15,000 per year per person — posed by these drugs suggests that policymakers may have no alternative but to step in and bring their costs in line with their social benefits,” they write. “If policymakers succeed in doing so, we could build a model for drug price negotiation that enables an extraordinary medical breakthrough to improve both our health and our fiscal position.”

Prof. David Autor speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Douglas about how there may be another “China shock” due to the influx of goods manufactured in China being made available in foreign markets. “It won’t be the same China shock,” says Autor, adding that “the concerns are more fundamental” as China is competing with advanced economies in cars, computer chips and complex machinery.

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Evan Sellinger about her new book, “The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future With Robots,” in which she makes the case that in the future robots and humans will be able to team up to create a better world. “I want to highlight that machines don’t have to compete with humans, because we each have different strengths. Humans have wisdom. Machines have speed, can process large numbers, and can do many dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks,” Rus explains. “I see robots as helpers for our jobs. They’ll take on the routine, repetitive tasks, ensuring human workers focus on more complex and meaningful work.”

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Kristin Forbes delves into her new study examining how quantitative tightening (QT) programs impact markets. “QT programs have, so far, been working as central banks intended,” Forbes writes. “At the same time, they have provided a small degree of support for central banks’ efforts to tighten financial conditions, with minimal impact on market functioning and liquidity. QT has worked in the opposite direction to quantitative easing, but the effects are much, much more muted.”

Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with CNBC reporter Kevin Williams about how the rise of generative AI technologies could lead to cyberattacks on physical infrastructure. “If you cause a power plant to stop from a typical cyberattack, it will be back up and online pretty quickly,” Madnick explains, “but if hackers cause it to explode or burn down, you are not back online a day or two later; it will be weeks and months because a lot of the parts in these specialized systems are custom made.”