MIT community in 2021: A year in review
Top Institute stories dealt with the return to campus and continued response to Covid-19, MIT’s commitments to climate action, its support of a diverse community, and more.
MIT’s top research stories of 2021
The year’s popular research stories include a promising new approach to cancer immunotherapy, the confirmation of a 50-year-old theorem, and a major fusion breakthrough.
Q&A: Cathy Wu on developing algorithms to safely integrate robots into our world
Assistant professor of civil engineering describes her career in robotics as well as challenges and promises of human-robot interactions.
Giving bug-like bots a boost
A new fabrication technique produces low-voltage, power-dense artificial muscles that improve the performance of flying microrobots.
From counting blood cells to motion capture, sensors drive patient-centered research
SENSE.nano symposium highlights the importance of sensing technologies in medical studies.
Nonsense can make sense to machine-learning models
Deep-learning methods confidently recognize images that are nonsense, a potential problem for medical and autonomous-driving decisions.
Systems scientists find clues to why false news snowballs on social media
A new model shows that the more polarized and hyperconnected a social network is, the more likely misinformation will spread.
$7 million gift from the Shiv Nadar Foundation bolsters undergraduate research and women in EECS
Gift will help establish the Vamasundari Devi Fellowship Fund to provide financial support to graduate students and the SuperUROP program, which provides undergraduates with two-semester research opportunities.
Q&A: Can the world change course on climate?
Political scientist Nazli Choucri discusses challenges and hopes for global coordination on climate issues — and the role of political science in the process.
Machine learning speeds up vehicle routing
Strategy accelerates the best algorithmic solvers for large sets of cities.
Machine-learning system flags remedies that might do more harm than good
The system could help physicians select the least risky treatments in urgent situations, such as treating sepsis.
EECS graduate women’s research summit increases research visibility and strengthens community
Summit features the latest research of women and other underrepresented genders in MIT EECS, along with an opportunity to network, share experiences, and learn.
Tiny machine learning design alleviates a bottleneck in memory usage on internet-of-things devices
New technique applied to small computer chips enables efficient vision and detection algorithms without internet connectivity.
Machines that see the world more like humans do
A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.
Q&A: More-sustainable concrete with machine learning
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers aim to design concrete mixtures that use AI to shrink environmental footprint and cost, while recycling byproducts and increasing performance.