In the Media

Roughly 100 high school students, two from each state, attended this past weekend’s “Youth AI Festival,” organized in part by MIT RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) to discuss the need for clear AI policies for K-12 education, writes Boston Globe reporter Marcela García. “[T]he students discussed, wrote, and approved a model AI-use policy for classrooms, ending in a simulated Senate floor debate and vote at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute,” García explains.  

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to discuss her group’s work developing liquid neural networks, AI that runs locally on a given device rather than a data center to increase privacy and improve energy efficiency. By using liquid AI, "you avoid privacy concerns and you avoid the security concerns associated with accessing the cloud,” says Rus. “Furthermore, the cost of running your models on a device is much, much lower than running a huge model in the cloud.” 

Prof. Catherine Wolfram speaks to Marketplace’s Kristin Schwab about the rise in gas prices during the conflict with Iran.  

Research Associate James Walsh joins Scott Tong, host of WBUR’s “Here & Now,” to discuss the escalation of the U.S.-Iran war. “Geographically it [the conflict] is spreading because it also includes U.S. attacks on cities in Iran it has not previously attacked,” says Walsh. “It [the war] has also expanded or escalated in the type of targets that are being hit.” 

Fortune reporter Preston Fore highlights Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee's warning that companies should not replace entry level jobs with AI. “[I]f you’re pulling back on your entry-level hiring, you are probably sacrificing future opportunities to learn and the skilled people of the future,” says McAfee. “You’re also turning off the spigot of the most enthusiastic power users of AI in your organization.”  

Prof. Richard Samuels joins Adrian Ma, host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” program, to discuss Japan's efforts to form a new centralized intelligence agency. “The real threats to Japan today are the shifting balance of power in northeast Asia,” says Samuels. “This strategic environment in 2026 is not the same as the strategic environment during the Cold War and not during the post-Cold War. It's something quite new.” 

A new study by MIT researchers finds high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets may increase the risk of certain intestinal cancers, writes Newsweek’s Daniella Gray. “The researchers say future studies will be needed to better understand how specific dietary fats influence cancer risk and whether modifying the composition of ketogenic diets could reduce potential harms while preserving any health benefits,” writes Gray.  

Alumnus Vikas Enti ‘20, founder of Reframe Systems, speaks to Boston 25 about his company’s work aimed at lowering the time and costs of home building with their new system that they used to robotically fabricate a residential building in Somerville. “We went from starting foundation work to handing keys over to our customer in about 180 days,” says Enti. “It would typically take about 18 months to build a structure like this in cities like Somerville—it's almost three times faster. Our units also cost 20% lower than traditional construction costs.” 

Prof. Justin Reich speaks to PBS reporter Hannah Grabenstein about the dangers of children using Google’s AI overview, and AI mode. “It's deeply disturbing how poorly these widely accessible tools do,” says Reich. “These are things that technology companies have to fix. And teachers and educators, until this is fixed, probably need to turn a bunch of this off.” 

Smithsonian Magazine’s Sarah Kuta highlights Lecturer Franco Rossi’s work identifying the name of ancient Maya mathematician Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-chested fox,” inscribed in a chamber with murals, hieroglyphs and mathematical texts. One of Waax’s equations, linking the cycles of Mars and Venus to units of time in the Maya calendar, is “meant to concisely and meaningfully show the relationship between these two planets and human counts of time in ways that could then be applied to political ceremony, predictive astronomy and understandings of seasonality,” says Rossi. 

Research Scientist Maria Jesús Saénz discusses the benefits and barriers to companies adopting AI in their supply chains for a Financial Times article by reporter Lucy Colback. “If you are having humans change their process for automation in order to substitute themselves, this is a very perverse thing,” Saénz says. “They want to keep their salary and might boycott the AI. [They may] be algorithm averse.” 

Richard Locke, dean of MIT Sloan School of Management, speaks to Poets&Quants reporter Marc Ethier about Sloan’s new evening MBA program, designed for full-time workers. “There’s an incredibly rich population in the Boston-New England regional area who have the same grades, the same test scores, the same experience as our current MBA students,” says Locke. “The one exception is they don’t want to leave their jobs. They want to continue to work, but they want to actually get an MBA from a place like MIT Sloan. They want to accelerate their careers where they are.” 

Boston Business Journal’s Maya Shavit showcases MIT Sloan School of Management’s new evening Master of Business Administration degree, designed for full-time workers, which will welcome its first cohort in August 2027. “MIT has strong ties to so many firms and organizations in this ecosystem, but if we could actually be pumping out even more high-skilled, highly talented, ambitious future leaders in the local economy that’s only going to be good for the regional economy,” says Richard Locke, dean of MIT Sloan.  

MIT researchers found that the keto diet, which emphasizes low carbs and sugar, could increase the risk of tumors in the small intestine, explains New York Post reporter Allie Yang. The researchers found that “cells burning fat (from ketosis) start a chain reaction which leads to stem cells multiplying rapidly, increasing the chance they go out of control and become cancer,” Yang explains.