Graduate student Zhichu Ren has developed CRESt (Copilot for Real-World Experimental Scientist), a lab assistant which “suggests experiments, retrieves data, manages equipment and guides research to the next steps in an experiment,” reports Ryan Heath for Axios.
Writing for Wired, research scientist Kate Darling highlights the importance of addressing the fundamentally human behaviors that have been incorporated into AI chatbots. “Research in human-computer and human-robot interaction shows that we love to anthropomorphize—attribute humanlike qualities, behaviors, and emotions to—the nonhuman agents we interact with, especially if they mimic cues we recognize,” writes Darling. “And, thanks to recent advances in conversational AI, our machines are suddenly very skilled at one of those cues: language.”
Philip Adama Abel '15 co-founded Cleva, “a banking platform for African individuals and businesses to receive international payments by opening USD accounts,” reports Tage Kene-Okafor TechCrunch. “Long term, we are open to Cleva evolving from just being a product-only service to being a platform issuing APIs to do a bunch of other things that help us distribute services across other African countries or around the world,” says Abel.
Prof. Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation and inclusion at MIT Sloan, speaks with Bloomberg Law reporter Lauren Castle about her recent study that found female PhD students are 17% less likely to become new inventors compared with their male counterparts. “What we can show is relative to the supply into Ph.D. programs, there’s still just this huge difference in the percentage of women on patents coming out of the labs than there are in the university,” says Murray.
Prof. Florian Berg speaks with Fortune reporter Paolo Confino about the future of ESG initiatives. “The problem is that companies and also investors are often not really honest about their intentions,” Berg says. “They might actually sell something that’s purely a profit-driven decision and then write it in a report as they’re doing a lot for society even though they’re just engaging in profit maximization.”
Architectural Record senior editor Leopoldo Villardi spotlights the new Kendall/MIT MBTA gateway. “Falling under the jurisdiction of the MBTA are three precisely canted volumes—one enclosing a staircase, another accommodating an escalator, and the last housing an elevator—that peek up above the ground plane and lead to the station below," writes Villardi. "But beyond these access points, the street level is ostensibly MIT’s campus. A sleek, streamlined canopy, supported by a field of 26-foot-tall columns, hovers over the three prismatic kiosks to unify the composition.”
Prof. Julie Shah speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber about the implementation of automation in the work force. According to Shah, “when companies adopt automation successfully, they end up adding workers as they become more productive and fill more orders,” writes Weber. “And machines’ lack of flexibility has often resulted in what Shah calls ‘zero-sum automation,’ where gains in productivity are canceled out by the need for people to fix or reprogram robots and compensate for their drawbacks.”
MIT researchers have used machine learning to uncover the different kinds of sentences that most likely to activate the brain’s key language processing centers, reports Kyle Wiggers and Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch. The model, “was able to predict for novel sentences whether they would be taxing on human cognition or not,” they explain.
Popular Mechanics reporter Jill Waldbieser spotlights Prof. Hugh Herr and his work developing prosthetic limbs that integrate with their human hosts using a surgical technique that preserves the sensation in artificial limbs. “In the future, on the order of five years or so, we’ll be so good at this, we’ll completely restore the signals from the prosthetic to the brain and from the brain to the prosthetic, like the limb was never amputated,” says Herr.
Robert Stoner, interim director of the MIT Energy Initiative, speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude to discuss the climate crisis and some solutions being developed at MIT. "You have to be [optimistic]," says Stoner. "I do feel there are technological pathways that we can go down and get there. Solar and wind and storage get us an awful long way. We have to make these things cheaper, and there are an awful lot of people at MIT and at other great universities, and many companies, hammering away at those problems."
Prof. David Autor speaks with Bloomberg about the future of generative AI and the technology’s potential impact on productivity and the labor market. “When we interact with AI, we need to learn how to treat it not as authoritative, but as a guide to support decision making, and that’s really critical,” says Autor.
Writing for Inside Higher Ed, Columbia University Simons Fellow Robert W. Fernandez highlights MIT’s “publicly published outcomes for students of color.” “MIT’s data showed, for example, that the population of enrolled graduate students in biology who identified as underrepresented minorities increased from 4 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2023—suggesting that the institute’s recruitment efforts for that department have improved over time,” explains Fernandez.
Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, speaks with Science Friday host Ira Flatow about the current state of science journalism and the growing public distrust in science. “Science is a human enterprise,” says Blum. “We need to do full justice to that. And we need to allow people to see that science is people at work trying to understand the world around them.”
David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, speaks with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace about how cars in the U.S. are getting heavier and larger, and the environmental and safety costs associated with larger vehicles. “For decades, people who buy enormous, very heavy cars have been creating societal costs that they aren’t paying for. That’s what’s called a market failure,” said Zipper. “So if you want the market for automobiles to succeed, we need to make sure that when people are shopping for their next car, they are considering the societal costs of their purchase.”
The Economist spotlights the life of Prof. Emeritus Robert M. Solow, a Nobel laureate whose work in growth theory “added both to national spending and the economy’s productive capacity.” The Economist notes that: “the MIT culture he embodied disdained hierarchy, cherished collegial lunches and made time for students, many of whom became illustrious friends.”