In an article for Wired, research scientist Ashley Nunes writes about the need for legislation that regulates the use of human teleoperators that can assist robotaxis in emergency situations when human judgement is needed. “Self-driving technology can deliver considerable benefits to society, but realizing those benefits will require that safety and profitability go hand-in-hand,” writes Nunes.
Writing for Science, Prof. Richard Larson writes about his decision to enter semiretirement as a professor, post-tenure, a position at MIT aimed at creating more positions for rising academics. Larson writes that after investigating the impacts of eliminating the mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty he realized he was inadvertently “blocking the way of many young scholars who seek academic careers.”
Speaking with Reuters reporters Guy Faulconbridge and Paul Sandle, Prof. Tim Berners-Lee calls for disrupting the power held by giant companies over how the internet is operated. “What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up,” Berners-Lee explains. “There is a danger of concentration.”
MIT researchers have developed a language translation model that operates without human annotations and guidance, reports Liangyu for Xinhua news agency. The system, which may enable computer-based translations of the thousands of languages spoken worldwide, is “a step toward one of the major goals of machine translation, which is fully unsupervised word alignment,” Liangyu explains.
Researchers from MIT are using the brittle nature of graphene to mass produce cell-sized robots, writes David Grossman of Popular Mechanics. Called “syncells” or synthetic cells, the researchers hope they can be used in biomedical testing. “Inject hundreds into the bloodstreams and let the data fly back into sensors,” explains Grossman.
Fortune reporter Aaron Pressman highlights how Prof. Julie Shah is working on making human-robot collaboration on the assembly line more effective through the use of collaborative robots, dubbed cobots. Pressman writes that Shah “is working on software algorithms developed with machine learning that will teach cobots how and when to communicate by reading signals from the humans around them.”
Popular Science reporter Rob Verger highlights how an MIT spinout and MIT researchers are developing tools to detect depression. “The big vision is that you have a system that can digest organic, natural conversations, and interactions, and be able to make some conclusion about a person’s well-being,” says grad student Tuka Alhanai.
IEEE Spectrum reporter Mark Anderson highlights how Prof. Jeehwan Kim’s research group has developed techniques to produce ultrathin semiconducting films and harvest the materials necessary to manufacture 2-D electronics. Anderson explains that the group’s advances could make possible such innovations as high-efficiency solar cells attached to a car’s exterior and low-power, long-lasting wearable devices.
Financial Times reporter Jemima Kelly reports that MIT researchers have developed a low-power chip that is hardwired to perform public-key encryption. Kelly writes that the chip is “potentially a game-changer for simple, low-powered products such as smart sensors used by industry to gauge things such as temperature and pressure, as well as health monitors.”
Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe writes that fake news articles are destined for the same fate as spam emails thanks to research from MIT postdoc Ramy Baly, who is developing software to flag fake news sites. Baly hopes to “create a consumer news app that would direct users to reliable news sources from every point on the political compass.”
Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Mark Ellwood about her work developing a new device that allows researchers to test how a drug affects the human body. Ellwood notes that the technology that Griffith and her team have created “could prove vital for rapidly releasing new vaccines.”
TechCrunch reporter Kate Clark spotlights Prof. Tim Berners-Lee’s quest to decentralize the web and provide people with power over their personal data through his new startup inrupt. Clark explains that inrupt is expanding the platform Berners-Lee developed that allows users to “keep their data wherever they choose, rather than being forced to store it on centralized servers.”
A team of researchers led by Prof. J. Christopher Love has developed a system to produce on-demand clinical-grade vaccines and drugs, writes Dr. Francis Collins on the NIH Director’s Blog. In addition to allowing on site production for hospitals the systems could also “produce biologic treatments specially tailored to attack the cancer of a particular individual,” suggests Collins.
CNBC reporter Andrew Zaleski writes that MIT researchers have developed a neuromorphic chip design that could help advance the development of computers that operate like humans. The design could “lead to processors capable of carrying out machine learning tasks with dramatically lower energy demands,” Zaleski explains.
Popular Science reporter Rob Verger writes that MIT researchers have developed a new AI system that can help identify fake news. Verger explains that the researchers set out to create a tool that could “evaluate how factually strong different sites are, and their political bias.”