MIT spinoff E Ink, an ePaper technology company, has developed new color technology to provided stronger color displays for their devices, reports Harri Weber for TechCrunch. “Eventually, E Ink aims to build a magazine reading experience that’s good enough to win over even the most demanding publishers,” E Ink U.S. business lead Timothy O’Malley ’93 tells TechCrunch.
Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum speaks with Wired reporter Will Knight about AI image generators and the limitations of AI tools. “It's amazing what they can do,” says Tenenbaum, “but their ability to imagine what the world might be like from simple descriptions is often very limited and counterintuitive.”
Deepak Dugar MBA ’13, PhD ’13 founded Visolis, a biomanufacturing company developing carbon-negative, high-performance materials, reports John Cumbers for Forbes. “We use biology to make platform molecules. And then we use chemistry to turn them into a lot of different products. Because of this unique combination, we have an advantage both in terms of market as well as cost of technology development,” says Dugar.
Boston Magazine reporter Kyle Paoletta spotlights Arthur Jemison MCP ’94, the Chief of Planning and Director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency. “People making the decision every day to be together and to grow together: I’ve always wanted to be in the middle of that,” says Jemison. “Building that bridge.”
Collage New Music, Boston’s longest-running contemporary music group, will be performing at MIT’s Killian Hall on March 12, 2023, reports Lloyd Schwartz for WBUR. Schwartz also notes that Professor Emerita Ellen Harris will be introducing the Boston Camerata production of “Dido and Aeneas” on March 18 at Pickman Hall.
Graduate student Matthew Groh discusses Detect Fakes, a research project he co-created aimed at teaching people how to detect deepfakes, with Wall Street Journal reporter Ann-Marie Alcántara. Groh recommends people pay attention to the context of an image or video, noting that people can “pay attention to incentives and what someone is saying and why someone might be saying this.”
On a recent episode of “Shark Tank,” Amrita Saigal '10 scored a $250,000 investment in her company Kudos, which is focused on making disposable diapers from sustainable and natural materials, reports Megan Sauer for CNBC. Saigal, who also founded a company called Saathi that makes sanitary napkins from banana peel fibers, notes she was inspired by seeing “just how much plastic we were putting into sanitary napkins and diapers.”
Kevin Hu SB ’13, SM ’15, PhD ’19 co-founded Metaplane, a startup aimed at providing users with data analytics-focused tools, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Metaplane monitors data using anomaly detection models trained primarily on historical metadata. The monitors try to account for seasonality, trends and feedback from customers, Hu says, to minimize alert fatigue, “writes Wiggers.
Research Scientist Mary Knapp’s proposal for a Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (GO-LoW), a space-based observatory consisting of thousands of satellites that could study the magnetic fields of distant and rocky exoplanets, has been selected for NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts programs, writes George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues have found that “managers educated at business schools were more likely to favor shareholders over employees,” writes University of London Prof. André Spicer for the Financial Times. The researchers found that “employees working for companies run by a business school-educated manager earned, on average, 6 percent less in the US and 3 percent less in Denmark,” writes Spicer.
Writing for the Daily News, Prof. Carlo Ratti and Harvard Prof. Edward Glaeser highlight a new report by the “New” New York Panel aimed at reimagining New York City. “This is the moment to embrace the ‘New’ New York Panel’s three-pronged approach of reducing the unnecessary regulations that limit entrepreneurship, investing in New York’s children and creating exciting, safe, walkable streetscapes,” Ratti and Glaeser write.
Reuters reporter Will Dunham writes that a new study by MIT researchers uncovers the secret ingredient that made ancient Roman concrete so durable and could “pave the way for the modern use of a replicated version of this ancient marvel.” Prof. Admir Masic explains that the findings are “an important next step in improving the sustainability of modern concretes through a Roman-inspired strategy.”
A review led Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi has found that a major issue in health-related machine learning models “is the relative scarcity of publicly available data sets in medicine,” reports Emily Sohn for Nature.
Researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the Harvard Natural Language Processing Group developed the Giant Language model Test Room (GLTR), an algorithm that attempts to detect if text was written by a bot, reports Megan Morrone for Fast Company. “Using the ‘it takes one to know one’ method, if the GLTR algorithm can predict the next word in a sentence, then it will assume that sentence has been written by a bot,” explains Morrone.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station completed an experiment to test a system developed by researchers from MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative that would allow astronauts to build parts in space, reports Pranshu Verma for The Washington Post. The new system could allow astronauts to build and modify space stations “quicker, cheaper and with less complexity,” explains Ariel Ekblaw, director and founder of the Space Exploration Initiative. “It starts to unlock more opportunities for exploration.”