School of Engineering

Eight from MIT awarded 2016 Fulbright grants

Grantees will spend the 2016-2017 academic year conducting research abroad.

June 16, 2016

Researchers developed a simple application for devices that use Apple’s iOS operating system. The application flashes a small dot somewhere on the device’s screen, attracting the user’s attention, then briefly replaces it with either an “R” or an “L,” instructing the user to swipe either the right or left side of the screen. Correctly executing the swipe ensures that the user has act...

Eye-tracking system uses ordinary cellphone camera

Crowd-sourced data yields system that determines where mobile-device users are looking.

June 15, 2016

David Hagan, a Tata Fellow and MIT PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering, is designing and building low-cost sensors that could be deployed in dense networks to monitor air pollution.

Air quality sensors track pollution

Research from MIT's Tata Center for Technology and Design is helping to quantify emissions in the world’s most polluted cities.

June 15, 2016

The MIT Portugal Program is sending 20 Portuguese entrepreneurs to the MIT campus in Cambridge.

Portuguese entrepreneurs participate in MIT's International Workshop on Innovating

Graduate students and entrepreneurs will be immersed in a residential, hands-on program designed for participants from Europe and from MIT.

June 14, 2016

The "artificial skin" developed by MIT Professor Ioannis Yannas is known as Integra. Its development is chronicled in the film "Hope Regenerated."

Department of Mechanical Engineering wins New England Emmy Award for “Hope Regenerated”

Emmy-winning video chronicles Professor Ioannis Yannas’ discovery of organ regeneration in the 1970s.

June 14, 2016

By patterning a solar absorber with tiny holes with diameters less than 400 nanometers, an MIT-Masdar Institute team has enhanced the range of solar energy that the device can absorb. Here, Masdar Institute postdoc Jin You Lu characterizes the nanoporous solar absorber using UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopy.

New solar absorber could improve efficiency of solar thermal technology

Masdar Institute-MIT team develops device that harnesses more sunlight, enhancing efficiency of heat production.

June 13, 2016

Professor Chris Terman (center) developed digital tools to better teach students computational structures. He is flanked by Dean for Graduate Education Christine Ortiz (left) and Dean for Undergraduate Education Dennis M. Freeman.

First annual MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Awards presented

Awards honor faculty and instructors who have effectively leveraged digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT.

June 13, 2016

Researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories have designed a device that is an array of 37 microfabricated lasers on a single chip. Its power requirements are relatively low because the radiation emitted by all of the lasers is “phase locked,” meaning that the troughs and crests of its waves are perfectly aligned.

New approach to microlasers

Technique for “phase locking” arrays of tiny lasers could lead to terahertz security scanners.

June 13, 2016

“Researchers and practitioners have struggled to compare the costs of different [energy] storage technologies, because of the multiple dimensions of cost and the fact that no technology dominates along all dimensions," says Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Assistant Professor of Energy Studies at MIT.

Energy storage for renewables can be a good investment today, study finds

Systems that bank energy can add value to solar and wind projects.

June 13, 2016

This diagram depicts the way a new surface treatment can improve the efficiency and longevity of perovskite materials for use in applications such as fuel-cell electrodes. Within the bulk of the material (bottom left) oxygen vacancies shown as “holes” are distributed throughout the material, and cause intense chemical reactivity. But on the surface, many of those vacancies get filled by oxygen...

Researchers find a way to extend life and improve performance of fuel cell electrodes

Surface treatment greatly reduces degradation of catalyst material.

June 13, 2016

Artificial intelligence produces realistic sounds that fool humans

Video-trained system from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab could help robots understand how objects interact with the world.

June 13, 2016