In the Media

Boston Business Journal reporter Hannah Green spotlights the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative, a new effort designed to connect researchers, medical professionals, and industry leaders in a shared mission to address some of the most pressing health challenges of our time. Green notes that the collaborative aims to “spur high-impact discoveries and health solutions through interdisciplinary projects across engineering, science, AI, economics, business, policy, design, and the humanities.” 

Using a new technique developed to examine the risks of multimodal large language models used in robots, MIT researchers were able to have a “simulated robot arm do unsafe things like knocking items off a table or throwing them by describing actions in ways that the LLM did not recognize as harmful and reject,” writes Will Knight for Wired. “With LLMs a few wrong words don’t matter as much,” explains Prof. Pulkit Agrawal. “In robotics a few wrong actions can compound and result in task failure more easily.”

MIT researchers have developed a gastric balloon that can inflate before eating and contract afterwards in an effort to ensure the body does not grow accustomed to the balloon, reports Nicola Davis for The Guardian. “What we try to do here is, in essence, simulate the mechanical effects of having a meal,” explains Prof. Giovanni Traverso. “What we want to avoid is getting used to that balloon." 

Professor Giovanni Traverso and his colleagues have developed a new gastric balloon that can be inflated and deflated to mimic feeling full. Unlike traditional gastric balloons, which are one size, the new version is “connected to an external control device that can be attached to the skin and contains a pump that inflates and deflates the balloon when needed,” writes Ernie Mundell for HealthDay. 

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with ABC News reporter Julia Jacobo about the role of green hydrogen in decarbonization efforts. “Hydrogen itself could be a really important component to a green transition,” says Trancik. 

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have compared 12 large language models (LLMs) against 925 human forecasters for a three-month forecasting tournament to help predict real-world events, including geopolitical events, reports Tomas Gorny for Forbes. "Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments,” the researchers explain.

Grist reporter Matt Simon spotlights a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that finds “large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills.” Graduate student Martin Staadecker explains: “Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important. But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”

Smithsonian Magazine reporter Michael Snyder spotlights Marion Mahony Griffin,  an “inventive and remarkable architect” who was the second woman to earn an architecture degree from MIT. “A brilliant graphic artist with a deep interest in Japanese printmaking, Mahony created the signature aesthetic of [Frank Llyod] Wright’s perspective drawings, bursting with exquisite detail,” explains Snyder. 

MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative Program Scientist Scott Odell speaks with USA Today reporter Kate Petersen about the impact of renewable energy mining. “We can really reduce the amount of virgin metal we need to mine just by using the old metal we've already got,” says Odell. “We need to design our systems such that we have the capacity to recycle those metals.”

Joe Higgins, MIT’s vice president for campus services and stewardship, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Sabrina Shankman about the Consortium for Climate Solutions, a new effort led by MIT, Harvard and Mass General Brigham to enable the development of large-scale renewable energy projects. “The science is telling us that we need to triple the amount of renewable energy on the power grids by 2030 and it’s not happening fast enough,” says Higgins. “It really came down to, we need new models … and how do we come together to do that with much greater impact, at a much greater speed?”

Forbes reporter John M. Bremen spotlights a new study by MIT researchers that “shows the most skilled scientists and innovations benefitted the most from AI – doubling their productivity – while lower-skilled staff did not experience similar gains.” The study “showed that specialized AI tools foster radical innovation at the technical level within a domain-specific scope, but also risk narrowing human roles and diversity of thought,” writes Bremen. 

Writing for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota SB '08, MS '16, MBA '16 shares insight into how entrepreneurs can use AI to build successful startups. AI “can be a strategic advantage when implemented wisely and used as a tool to support, rather than replace, the human touch,” writes Hayes-Mota. 

Wall Street Journal reporter John Anderson spotlights NOVA’s “Building Stuff: Change It!” – a program that follows engineers, including Prof. Maria Yang, as they “seek to help humanity adapt to a changing world, drawing on the ideas and traditions of the past to create new technologies.” When discussing efforts to adapt to climate change, Yang explains: “All design is redesign.”

Inspired by his daily walks, Prof. Elfatih Eltahir and his colleagues have developed a new way to measure how climate change is likely to impact the number of days when it is comfortable to be outdoors, reports Maddie Browning for WBUR. “I find people walking, jogging, cycling and enjoying the outdoors,” says Eltahir. “That's what motivated me to start looking at how climate change could really constrain some of those activities.”

Prof. Armando Solar-Lezama speaks with New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler about the future of coding jobs, noting that AI systems still lack many essential skills. “When you’re talking about more foundational skills, knowing how to reason about a piece of code, knowing how to track down a bug across a large system, those are things that the current models really don’t know how to do,” says Solar-Lezama.