Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Iyad Rahwan explores the complex issue of whether AI assistants should be designed to reveal that they are machines. “Although there is broad consensus that machines should be transparent about how they make decisions, it is less clear whether they should be transparent about who they are,” writes Rahwan.
Forbes contributor James Jennings spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s book “Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought.” Jennings writes that Lo “proposes a new theory he calls the ‘Adaptive Markets Hypothesis,’ which seeks to synthesize the theories of the behavioral school of investing (investors are biased and irrational) and the efficient markets school (investors are rational, profit-maximizing machines).”
Prof. David Mindell writes for Forbes about the history of NASA spaceflight accidents. “If I were a young astronaut looking forward to an exciting career in a new era of human spaceflight,” writes Mindell, “I’d be asking some tough questions.”
President Emerita Susan Hockfield, Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia and Prof. Nancy Hopkins have convened a working group to increase the number of women in biotech. “We’ve been talking about the 40 companies that haven’t happened because women haven’t had the opportunity,” said Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president of research. “If a number of those 40 companies had come to pass, people would have treatments today that they don’t have.”
STAT reporter Sharon Begley spotlights how President Emerita Susan Hockfield and Profs. Sangeeta Bhatia and Nancy Hopkins are tackling the gender imbalance in biotech. “Our working hypothesis is that engagement [on scientific advisory boards and boards of directors] can help increase the number” of women-founded biotechs,” Bhatia explains.
Fast Company reporter Arianne Cohen writes that a new study by Prof. Arnold Barnett finds flying today is much safer than it was in the past. Barnett examined flight safety from 2008 to 2017 and found that “globally, flying today is six times safer than 30 years ago, and 22 times safer than 50 years ago.”
ArtNet reporter Zachary Small writes that Christine Sun Kim, who has an upcoming exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, will deliver her American Sign Language rendition of the National Anthem during the Super Bowl.
In an article for The Boston Globe, Damian Garde spotlights how research universities like MIT help make it possible to bring new medical treatment from the lab to fruition and contribute to the thriving biotechnology sector in Cambridge and Boston.
Prof. Andrew Sutherland writes for The Conversation about his new research that demonstrates testing investment advisors on their knowledge of ethics often leads to better behavior. “Those who were tested more rigorously on questions of ethics ended up having fewer episodes of misconduct,” writes Sutherland. “They are also less likely to tolerate scandals at their firms.”
MIT is launching a new master’s in data, economics and development policy for which students can gain admissions based on their performance in online courses, reports Paul Basken for Times Higher Education. Basken notes that the goal of the program is to enable “students from around the world who have the ability and motivation to succeed but lack the traditional credentials for entry.”
Principal Research Scientist Jeanne Ross speaks with Peter High of Forbes about her new book and how companies can implement a successful digital transformation of their enterprises. “What is hard for companies is that you cannot simply pick a strategy and insist it will succeed,” says Ross. “Instead, you have to try a strategy and see if it will succeed. If it does not, companies have to pivot.”
MIT researchers have developed a system, called RoadTagger, that helps improve digital maps by automatically predicting what roads will look like behind obstructions, reports Courtney Linder for Popular Mechanics. RoadTagger is “able to guess how many lanes a given road has and whether it's a highway or residential road,” Linder explains.
MIT alumnus Michael Gruenbaum ‘53 recounts how due to his “mother’s persistence and a lot of luck,” he evaded being sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp and survived the Holocaust. “It behooves all of us to be very much on the alert and make sure that the smallest of such incidents is immediately thwarted and stopped in its tracks,” writes Gruenbaum.
Media Lab research scientist Stephanie Nguyen writes for Fast Company about how a number of social-impact startups affiliated with MIT Solve are handling privacy laws and concerns. Nguyen notes that, “if we take cues from what smaller companies are doing, we can find inspiration to make data privacy less about compliance and more about building products that meet user expectations and contexts.”
Boston Globe reporter David Weininger spotlights Johnny Gandelsman’s upcoming performance at MIT of Bach’s Cello Suites on the violin. Weininger explores how the inspiration for Gandelsman’s reinvention of Bach’s Cello Suites was inspired by a concert he gave at MIT in 2015, during which he realized that “I wasn’t quite ready to stop working on Bach’s music.”