Researchers from MIT and Harvard have found that “Chinese companies lead the world in exporting face recognition,” potentially enabling other governments to perform more surveillance and harming citizens’ human rights, reports Will Knight for Wired. “The fact that China is exporting to these countries may kind of flip them to become more autocratic, when in fact they could become more democratic,” says Prof. Martin Beraja.
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, discusses the future of artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of balancing the development of new technologies with the need to ensure they are deployed in a way that benefits humanity. “We have to advance the science and engineering of autonomy and the science and engineering of intelligence to create the kinds of machines that will be friendly to people, that will be assistive and supportive for people and that will augment people with the tasks that they need help with,” Rus explains.
Graduate student Karenna Groff ’22 speaks with CBS Boston reporter Mike UVA about her academic and athletic accomplishments. “Groff become just the sixth Division III student-athlete ever to be recognized as the NCAA Woman of the Year,” says Uva. “An honor that celebrates excellence both on and off the field for all divisions.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that “the energy required to run computers in a future global fleet of autonomous vehicles could produce as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world,” reports Sharon Udasin for The Hill. The researchers found that “1 billion such cars, each driving for an hour daily, would use enough energy to generate the same amount of emissions that data centers do today.”
Boston.com reporter Melissa Ellin spotlights the MIT AgeLab’s Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES), “a suit that allows wearers to feel what it is like to be 80 years old with some chronic health conditions,” writes Ellin. The suit was recently featured in “Limitless with Chris Hemsworth,” a docuseries highlighting scientific research and insight into the human body.
Principal research scientist Eric Heginbotham and his colleagues speak with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Tobin Harshaw about their study simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “The project developed a war game with hundreds of tokens that include forces from the US, China, Taiwan and Japan,” Heginbotham and his colleagues explain. “Air and naval operations were played on a 5-by-6 foot map that covers the Western Pacific. Ground operations were played on a separate map that covers Taiwan.”
NBC 1st Look host Chelsea Cabarcas visits MIT to learn more about how faculty, researchers and students are “pioneering the world of tomorrow.” Cabarcas meets the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle team and gets a peek at Nimbus, the single-occupant vehicle that team members raced in the American Solar Challenge from Kansas City to New Mexico. Cabarcas also sees the back-flipping MIT mini cheetah that could one day be used in disaster-relief operations.
Xin Liu SM ’17, art curator for the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, and Pat Pataranutaporn, a graduate student, speak with Mashable video producer Teodosia Dobriyanova about why sending plastic-eating bacteria to space could aid sustainability efforts. “We envision that in the future when astronauts, as they travel deeper into space, they’ll need to do what we call in-situ resource utilization,” says Pataranutaporn. “So using the materials that already exists there, in this case plastic waste, to upcycle it into new materials.”
Prof. Zachary Cordero and his team are working to develop an in-space manufacturing technique to design a satellite reflector that can monitor storms and precipitation through moisture changes in the atmosphere, reports Ramin Skibba for Wired. “It involves bending a single strand of wire at specific nodes and angles, then adding joints to make a stiff structure,” writes Skibba.
Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner spotlights Boston as a potential leader in climate technology for their “incubator spaces like Greentown Labs in Somerville and The Engine in Cambridge.”
Prof. Steven Barrett speaks with New York Times reporter Paige McClanahan about the pressing need to make air travel more sustainable and his research exploring the impact of contrails on the planet’s temperature. “Eliminating contrails is quite a big lever on mitigating the climate impact of aviation,” said Barrett.
Politico reporter Derek Robertson writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds the computing power required to replace the world’s auto fleet with AVs would produce about the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers currently operating. Robertson writes that the researchers view the experiment “as an important step in getting auto- and policymakers to pay closer attention to the unexpected ways in which the carbon footprint for new tech can increase.”
MIT researchers have discovered that ancient Romans used calcium-rich mineral deposits to build durable infrastructure, reports Daniel Cusick for Scientific American. This “discovery could have implications for reducing carbon emissions and creating modern climate-resilient infrastructure,” writes Cusick.
Researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed “a new type of electrically conductive hydrogel ‘scaffold’ that could eventually be used to create a soft brain-computer interface (or BCI) that translates neural signals from the brain into machine-readable instructions,” reports Adam Bluestein for Fast Company.
Writing for The Conversation, Prof. Heather Hendershot explores the growth of politically-biased news coverage, comparing Ted Baxter of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” - a fictional news anchor more interested in personal fame than journalistic standards - to today’s pundits. “Ted Baxter thus embodied the ego of the pundit, but without the opinions that often make such a person dangerous,” writes Hendershot. “For all his incompetence, it never occurred to him to air his own political views.”