“Google And Massachusetts Institute of Technology have figured out a way to remove those annoying reflections and other image obstructions, including fences and rain drops, from photos,” writes Nitya Rajan for The Huffington Post. The algorithm uses a short video to separate the foreground and background of an image.
MIT students collaborated with residents of the Boston Home, a facility for adults with neurological diseases, to create InstaAid, an app that acts as a call button for nurses on the campus, writes Virgie Hoban for The Boston Globe. “The app preserves the independence of people contending with debilitating diseases," Hoban explains.
Professor Thomas Kochan writes for Fortune about the latest job’s report from The Bureau of Labor Statistics and argues that the Federal Reserve should set an explicit wage growth target: “Without significant and steady progress on the pay front, the American dream is in peril.”
Catherine Pearson writes for The Huffington Post about the Gala Pump, a compression breast pump designed by Kohana Inc. at MIT’s “make the breast pump not suck” hackathon: “Kohana has run a small clinical trial with 30 moms and says the majority of those women preferred The Gala to their vacuum pumps.”
Kim Yi Dionne writes for The Washington Post about Professor Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s book ‘Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe’: In it, Mavhunga “paints a vivid picture of hunting in Zimbabwe from the pre-colonial period to the present as he demonstrates how innovation is driven by ordinary people.”
Kelsey Atherton writes for Popular Science about HERMES, a humanoid robot created by MIT researchers that is controlled by a human pilot strapped into a remote exoskeleton. PhD candidate Joao Ramos describes it as “trying to put the human’s brain inside the robot.”
Professor Edward Gibson speaks on Huffington Post Live about his research, which indicates that all human languages share a common link. “It turns out that across all languages people tend to put the words that go together to make the bigger phrases close together linearly in the sentences,” said Gibson.
Charlotte Lytton writes for The Daily Beast about SenseGlass, a mirror created by graduate student Javier Hernandez that uses Google Glass technology to register physiological and emotional changes in the viewer. “I believe mirrors are a great platform for health monitoring as we use them [everyday],” says Hernandez.
LJ Rich reports for The BBC on an algorithm created by MIT and Google researchers that can remove reflections and obstructions from images. “The technique separates the foreground from the background using frames from a short video,” explains Rich.
Professor Yasheng Huang writes for The New York Times about the role of the government in the recent downturn in Chinese markets. “The current mess is entirely due to the active encouragement by the authorities to invest in the markets and to lax regulations," Huang writes.
“MIT PhD student Abe Davis has developed video technology that reveals an object’s hidden properties,” writes Joanna Goodman for The Guardian. “Davis uses high-speed silent video to capture and reproduce sound, including music and intelligible speech, from the vibrations it makes on inanimate objects.”
Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner has been commissioned in part by the MIT List Visual Arts Center to create a mural at Dewey Square Park, writes Malcolm Gay for The Boston Globe. “We hope that the viewers in Boston take away their own individual reading of the mural after seeing it,” said List director Paul Ha.
Dave Gershgorn writes for Popular Science about an algorithm created by MIT and Google researchers that can remove obstructions from photos: “[T]he algorithm detects what obstruction is in the foreground,” writes Gershgorn, “then replaces the space that would be missing, when the foreground and backgrounds layers are separated, with pixels from the other photos.”
“Researchers at MIT and Google have created an algorithm that uses multiple images taken from different angles to separate foreground obstacles from the subject that's in the background,” writes Lucy Perkins for NPR. The algorithm can be used to remove unwanted reflections from photos.
Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times writes about Professor Amy Finkelstein’s survey of low-income Oregonians in which she determined that those given access to Medicaid spent more on healthcare than the uninsured. “There’s overwhelming evidence from our study and others that when you cover people with health insurance, they use more health care,” said Finkelstein.