In the Media

Prof. Jinhua Zhao writes for Boston Magazine about how artificial intelligence could help improve the MBTA system. “When something significant happens on public transportation—the line is down, the road is congested, some bridge is blocked—the customer is suddenly stuck in the system and needs more help,” writes Zhao. “For when that happens, we developed a solution to send individualized guidance for a better transit option to that person, communicated by text message or an app.”

Using techniques inspired by kirigami, a Japanese paper-cutting technique, MIT researchers have developed a “a novel method to manufacture plate lattices – high performance materials useful in automotive and aerospace designs,” reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “The kirigami-augmented plate lattices withstood three times as much force as standard aluminum corrugation designs,” writes Paul. “Such variations show immense promise for lightweight, shock-absorbing sections needed within cars, planes, and spacecraft." 

Fortune has named Katie Rae, CEO of The Engine, as one of the top 13 seed stage, climate tech VCs to watch, reports Lucy Brewster for Fortune. “Rae tops venture firm The Engine, which beyond being a fund, is an investing arm that spun out of MIT,” explains Brewster. “Yet Rae invests in an array of companies and sources founders from beyond just university walls.”

Researchers at MIT have developed a supercapacitor, an energy storage system, using cement, water and carbon, reports Macie Parker for The Boston Globe. “Energy storage is a global problem,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “If we want to curb the environmental footprint, we need to get serious and come up with innovative ideas to reach these goals.”

Prof. Yoon Kim speaks with Popular Science reporter Charlotte Hu about how large language models like ChatGPT operate. “You can think of [chatbots] as algorithms with little knobs on them,” says Kim. “These knobs basically learn on data that you see out in the wild,” allowing the software to create “probabilities over the entire English vocab.”

Adjunct Prof. Tali Sharot speaks with NPR Life Kit host Marielle Segarra about how lying impacts the brain. Sharot refers to an experiment she conducted that used brain imaging technology to monitor how the brain reacts to lying and found that as adults “grew more comfortable lying, the emotional response decreased – meaning that the players became more and more desensitized to their dishonesty with each subsequent lie.”

Research by Alden Cheng PhD ‘23 “suggests that big college football games in October 2016 distracted voters from seeing fake news stories that favored Donald Trump,” reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. “Counties around colleges that played a big game in that month had fewer online searches for pro-Trump fake-news-related terms and had lower percentages of votes for Trump than would otherwise have been expected, given other political demographics,” writes Lewis.

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights WiTricity, an MIT spinoff that designs wireless charging systems. “WiTricity uses magnetic fields rather than cables to give batteries a boost,” explains Bray.

A new working paper co-authored by Prof. Nathan Wilmers finds that affordable chain restaurants can provide “much more socioeconomic integration than do independently owned commercial businesses — or, for that matter, traditional public institutions,” reports Catherine Rampell for The Washington Post. “The authors analyzed a massive trove of geolocation data to assess where and when Americans come into contact with people of different income classes than themselves,” writes Rampbell, “if they do at all.”

Graduate students Martin Nisser and Marisa Gaetz co-founded Brave Behind Bars, a program designed to provide incarcerated individuals with coding and digital literacy skills to better prepare them for life after prison, reports Morgan Radford for MSNBC. Computers and coding skills “are really kind of paramount for fostering success in the modern workplace,” says Nisser.

Writing for The Washington Post, graduate student Thomas Roberts underscores the importance of investing in new technologies to mitigate the risks posed by space debris. “Space operators can control how some large objects return to Earth. But this requires extra fuel reserves and adaptive control technologies, which translate into higher costs,” writes Roberts. 

Prof. Scott Stern co-leads the Place-Based Innovation Policy Study Group – “a group of academics, practitioners and NSF staff that aims to deploy ‘timely insight for the NSF Regional Innovation Engines program,’” reports Nature. Stern and his colleagues are “providing an assessment of the ‘state of knowledge’ of place-based innovation ecosystems and their relationship to geographical and socio-economic inclusion,” writes Nature.

Prof. Nina Roussille has found that “women on average asked for 3.3% less than men for a full-time engineering job, with that gap growing to 6% for women with more experience,” reports Alicia Wallace for CNN. “However, when salary transparency was employed on the site and a median wage was given, the gap closed.” 

MIT scientists have developed a new brain “atlas” and computer model that sheds insight into the brain-body connections in C. elegans worms, reports Lauren Leffer for Scientific American. “Through establishing those brain-behavior links in a humble roundworm,” writes Leffer, “neuroscientists are one step closer to understanding how all sorts of animal brains, even potentially human ones, encode action.”

Gus Solomons Jr. ’61, “a leading figure in modern and postmodern dance,” has died at 84, reports Gia Kourlas for The New York Times. Solomons began dancing at age 4, but didn’t begin training until he was a first year student at MIT, where he earned a degree in architecture. “Over his long career, Mr. Solomons danced with many companies and many choreographers, including Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham,” Kourlas notes. “He broke ground as the first Black dancer to join the Cunningham company.”