Researchers at MIT CSAIL have developed a robotic arm that can put a vest on a human. “The promise of such technology is clear: helping people with mobility issues perform tasks that many of us take for granted,” writes Brian Heater for TechCrunch.
Researchers at MIT have developed a robot that can slide a vest onto a human arm, “which is an early but important step in creating a robot that could completely dress an aging or disabled person,” writes Mark Wilson for Fast Company. “In this work, we focus on a planning technique,” explains PhD candidate Shen Li. “If I dress a kid or adult, they might have different reactions. So you have to predict what they’ll do.”
Writing for Issues in Science and Technology, President L. Rafael Reif examines Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking 1945 Science, the Endless Frontier report and considers how our needs today have changed. “To meet this moment, we need to ensure that our federally sponsored research addresses questions that will enhance our competitiveness now and in the future,” writes Reif. “Our current system has many strengths…but we must not allow these historical advantages to blind us to gaps that could become fatal weaknesses.”
In conversation with WBUR’s Jason Beaubien, alumnus David Moinina Sengeh SM ’12, PhD ’16, discusses his dual roles as Sierra Leone’s Minister of Education and Chief Innovation Officer, and his vision for the future of the country. "In a world where there's cryptocurrency and quantum computing we can't be thinking classically anymore,” says Sengeh. “We have to think quantum. We have to think outside the box."
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, Dean of the School of Science, speaks with Becky Ferreira of Motherboard’s “Space Show” about LIGO’s 2015 discovery of gravitational waves and what researchers in the field have learned since then. “Every one of these observations tells us a little bit more about how nature has assembled our universe,” says Mavalvala. “Really, in the end, the question we're asking is: ‘How did this universe that we observe come about?”
Writing for The Hill, Prof. Sanjoy Mitter, Prof. Munther Dahleh, research affiliate Le Xie and their colleagues underscore the need to build a “resilient energy ‘superhighway,’ an electric grid that delivers a wide portfolio of energy supplies to the end users in a reliable manner.” They add that: “Investments are needed both in building the backbone interconnections, as well as in upgrading the ‘last mile’ distribution grid.”
Prof. Esther Duflo speaks with Mikaela Cohen of CNBC about how gender inequality, access to childcare and vaccine access are among the issues impacting the return to work in the U.S. and the global economic recovery. “We realized the current system is just not very workable. It just barely works,” says Duflo. “Women sustain themselves by pulling on their own boot straps.”
Wall Street Journal reporters Angus Loten and Kevin Hand spotlight how MIT researchers are developing robots with humanlike senses that will be able to assist with a range of tasks. GelSight, a technology developed by CSAIL researchers, outfits robot arms with a small gel pad that can be pressed into objects to sense their size and texture, while another team of researchers is “working to bridge the gap between touch and sight by training an AI system to predict what a seen object feels like and what a felt object looks like.”
Vice reporter Radhamely De Leon spotlights how researchers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon University have created “a search engine tool that shows what Google search results appear in different countries or languages, highlighting key differences in the algorithm between regions.”
As part of the Vax India Now event on CNN, Profs. Bruce Walker, Peko Hosoi and Parag Pathak, along with senior research scientist Chris Caplice and MIT Medical Director Cecilia Stuopis, participate in a discussion led by Vijay Joshi, Editor-in-Chief of The Press Trust of India, about what India can learn from America’s experience with vaccine distribution. “It is absolutely [in the U.S.’s] interest to make sure that everybody in India gets vaccinated, that everybody in South America get vaccinated,” says Hosoi. “We really are all in this together.”
Graduate student Shashank Srikant speaks with The Economist about his work developing a new model that can detect computer bugs and vulnerabilities that have been maliciously inserted into computer code.
Graduate student Emma Campbell-Mohn writes for The Washington Post about why Pope Francis has put former French foreign minister Robert Schuman, who helped lay the foundation for the European Union, on a path to sainthood. Campbell-Mohn writes that through this action, “the papacy has taken a quiet step toward suggesting its sympathy for the European Union and economic integration as a cornerstone for peace.”
Prof. Malick Ghachem speaks with NBC News reporter Corky Siemaszko about the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, the president of Haiti. “The question to ask at this time of tragedy for the Moïse family is not whether Jovenel Moïse was a true statesman or would-be despot,” says Ghachem. “Haiti has been locked in a worsening spiral of political instability since the 2010 earthquake that deteriorated drastically under the Martelly and Moïse governments.”
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, makes the case that society is undergoing a Great Reframing in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. “The pandemic, with far more impact than the Great Recession, has created a new psychosocial equilibrium — a renewed and heightened vigilance and priority to determine what is truly important and to make choices accordingly,” writes Coughlin. “Our view of life has been reframed.”
Nextiles, an MIT startup founded by alumnus George Sun, is developing smart threads, reports John Koetsier for Forbes. “We’re literally trying to sew the same kind of highway of data streams that you can normally find in a computer chip, but do that in clothing,” says Sun.