A number of MIT spinouts and research projects – including the MOXIE instrument that successfully generated oxygen on Mars, a new solar-powered desalination system and MIT spinout SurgiBox – were featured on TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023 list.
As MIT’s fall semester was starting, President Sally Kornbluth spoke with Ben Wildavsky, host of the Higher Ed Spotlight podcast, about the importance of incorporating the humanities in STEM education and the necessity of breaking down silos between disciplines to tackle pressing issues like AI and climate change. “Part of the importance of us educating our students is they’re going to be out there in the world deploying these technologies. They’ve got to understand the implications of what they’re doing,” says Kornbluth. “Our students will find themselves in positions where they’re going to have to make decisions as to whether these technologies that were conceived for good are deployed in ways that are not beneficial to society. And we want to give them a context in which to make those decisions.”
Joseph J. Kohn ’53, “who played a key role in extending the mathematics of calculus,” has died at 91, reports Kenneth Chang for The New York Times. “Dr. Kohn studied how mathematical functions behave in the realm of complex numbers,” writes Chang. “This field is esoteric, even to many mathematicians. But the techniques that Dr. Kohn developed have found use in tackling a wide range of problems in mathematics as well as fundamental equations in physics, including Einstein’s theory of general relativity.”
Roofscapes Studio, an MIT startup co-founded by Olivier Faber MArch ’23, Tim Cousin MArch ’23 and Eytan Levi MArch/MSRED ’21, transforms rooftops into greenspaces as part of an effort to combat climate change and provide green spaces in cities, reports Kim Willsher for The Guardian. The team is looking to add, “wooden platforms fixed across the sloping panes to create roof gardens, terraces and even walkways,” in Paris to help prevent the city from overheating.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Mitchel Resnick explores how a new coding app developed by researchers from the Lifelong Kindergarten group is aimed at allowing young people to use mobile phones to create interactive stories, games and animations. Resnick makes the case that with “appropriate apps and support, mobile phones can provide opportunities for young people to imagine, create, and share projects.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a transparency index used to assess 10 key AI foundation models, reports Ryan Heath for Axios. Heath writes that the researchers emphasized that “unless AI companies are more forthcoming about the inner workings, training data and impacts of their most advanced tools, users will never be able to fully understand the risks associated with AI, and experts will never be able to mitigate them.”
TechCrunch reporter Kylie Wiggers spotlights the SmartEM project by researchers from MIT and Harvard, which is aimed at enhancing lab work using, “a computer vision system and ML control system inside a scanning electron microscope” to examine a specimen intelligently. “It can avoid areas of low importance, focus on interesting or clear ones, and do smart labeling of the resulting image as well,” writes Wiggers.
“Brief Tender Light,” a documentary by Arthur Musah '04, MEng '05, spotlights four African-born MIT students and their experiences with adapting to the culture and challenges in and out of the classroom, reports Celina Colby for The Bay State Banner. “The story of international students, or specifically African students, in the U.S. hadn’t really been told,” says Musah. “Stats that I’ve learned more recently say there are about a million international students in any given year studying in the U.S., of which about 40,000 are African. That seems like a substantial portion of the fabric of American society.”
Research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna speaks with The World host Chris Harland-Dunaway about the science behind using non-invasive brain scans and artificial intelligence to understand people’s different thoughts and mental images.
Prof. John Fernández, director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative, speaks with Aynsley O’Neill and Jenni Doering of NPR’s Living on Earth about steps homeowners and renters can take to reduce the risk of wildfires impacting their homes. “The most important thing is to reduce the fuel that’s available between your house and the beginning of the forest, reducing the amount of objects that could ignite,” says Fernández. “That includes outdoor furniture [or] any plastic material.”
In an article for Bloomberg, Prof. Carlo Ratti and Michael Baick, a staff writer at CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, highlight the importance of communication within cities. “The world has an incredible stockpile of effective urban policies, but the best ideas are not being adopted quickly or widely enough,” write Ratti and Baick. “Covid-19 taught us all how to slow the spread of viruses: wear masks, avoid large gatherings and take vaccines. To speed the spread of good ideas, we need to take the opposite tack by making urban solutions go viral.”
Prof. M. Taylor Fravel speaks with NPR reporter Emily Feng about a new Pentagon report highlighting China’s accelerated efforts to develop a nuclear arsenal. “It’s a complete transformation of China's approach to nuclear weapon,” says Fravel. “[The information found in the report] confirms “the rapid modernization foreshadowed several years ago is on track.”
Institute Prof. Robert Langer speaks with Freakonomics host Stephen Dubner about his approach to failure and perseverance in his professional career. Langer recalls how despite early failures with developing new drug delivery methods, “I really believed that if we could do this, it would make a big difference in science, and I hoped a big difference in medicine.”
Holly Metcalf, head coach for the MIT women’s openweight rowing team, speaks with Esteban Bustillos of GBH News about the Survivor Rowing Network, a program aimed at introducing the sport of rowing to cancer survivors. Metcalf is coaching two boats from the Survivor Rowing in the 2023 Head of the Charles Regatta. “What I love about being here is students are visionary. And big world problems, they want to solve them. So maybe here at MIT one of my students may have an answer to getting rid of cancer,” she said. “That’s here. It’s all about finding answers through collaboration and that’s what rowing is, it’s a collaboration of mind, of body.”
Professor Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, a MacArthur genius grant recipient, “theoretical physicist, philosopher and writer who viewed science through a feminist lens,” has died at 87, reports Georgina Ferry for The Guardian. Keller’s work explored “how the practice of science had come to be perceived as intrinsically masculine, and to think about what a gender-neutral science might look like,” writes Ferry.