Prof. Olivier de Weck speaks with Forbes reporter Alex Knapp about the challenges and opportunities posed by building data centers in space. Data centers are “physically secure from intrusion and environmentally friendly once operational,” says de Weck. “Essentially, the three primary resources required on Earth—land, power, and cooling—are available ‘for free’ in space after the initial launch and deployment costs are covered.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi and Monica Agrawal PhD '23 speak with Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray about the risks on relying solely on AI for medical information. “What I’m really, really worried about is economically disadvantaged communities,” says Ghassemi. “You might not have access to a health care professional who you can quickly call and say, ‘Hey… Should I listen to this?’”
Prof. David Karger speaks with GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz about the rapid development of new AI tools, the need for generative AI regulation, and the importance of transparency when it comes to AI-generated content. "I think we need to involve more entities, more people, more sources in the fact-checking process,” says Karger. “We need to figure out how to ensure that the fact checking can propagate into the platforms, even though the platforms are not doing the fact checking themselves.”
Prof. Kevin Chen and his colleagues have developed a bee-like robot that can assist with farming practices, such as artificial pollination without damaging crops, reports Claire Turrell for Offrange. “Chen’s robot bee, which is tethered to a power source, is currently limited to flying between plastic flowers in the lab, but the robot engineer can see its potential,” explains Turrell. “Bees are doing great in terms of open-field farming,” says Chen. “But there is one potential type of pollination I think we can consider in the longer term, which is indoor farming,”
Prof. Lawrence Schmidt speaks with CNBC reporter Tom Huddleston Jr. about the influence of AI on the labor market. “It devalues existing expertise while simultaneously creating many new opportunities,” says Schmidt. “There's a sense in which AI may not be so distinct from past technologies.”
Graduate student Stephen Casper speaks with Wired reporter Matt Burgess about the rise of “deepfake video abuse and its role in nonconsensual intimate imagery generation.” “This ecosystem is built on the back of open-source models,” says Casper. “Oftentimes it’s just an open-source model that has been used to develop an app that then a user uses.”
Writing for The Conversation, Research Scientist Judah Cohen and Mathew Barlow of UMass Lowell examine how the polar vortex and moisture from a warm Gulf of Mexico created a monster winter storm that brought freezing rain, sleet and snow to large parts of the U.S. “Some research suggests that even in a warming environment, cold events, while occurring less frequently, may still remain relatively severe in some locations. One factor may be increasing disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex, which appear to be linked to the rapid warming of the Arctic with climate change,” they write. “A warmer environment also increases the likelihood that precipitation that would have fallen as snow in previous winters may now be more likely to fall as sleet and freezing rain.”
GBH reporter Renuka Balakrishnan spotlights “True or False,” a game featured in the MIT Museum’s “AI: Mind the Gap” exhibit, which invites visitors to guess the difference between a real and deepfake video. The exhibit “provides tips visitors can use outside the walls of the museum to improve media literacy in real life,” writes Balakrishnan.
Forbes reporter Craig Smith spotlights Prof. Regina Barzilay for her work using her personal health experience to develop transformative medical technology. In response to her breast cancer diagnosis, Barzilay “developed a deep learning model that analyzes mammography images to predict breast cancer risk up to five years in advance,” writes Smith.
Prof. Armando Solar-Lezama and Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speak with CNBC reporter Trevor Laurence Jockims about the impact of AI in the workforce. “These transitions are about efficiency, but also about trust and transparency: workers will need to trust that companies aren’t simply using AI as a cover for cost-cutting,” says Rus.
Prof. Jonathan How and graduate student Yi-Hsuan (Nemo) Hsiao speak with Tech Briefs reporter Andrew Corselli about their latest work developing an aerial microrobot that is “agile enough complete 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds, even when wind disturbances threatened to push it off course.” Hsiao explains that: “This work demonstrates that soft and microrobots, traditionally limited in speed, can now leverage advanced control algorithms to achieve agility approaching that of natural insects and larger robots, opening up new opportunities for multimodal locomotion.”
Institute Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Carl Higbie of Newsmax about the long-term profitability of new AI technologies, noting that AI's long-term success will ultimately be decided not by technological promise, but by whether AI tools can deliver sustainable profits. "Integrating AI actually is very difficult," Acemoglu explains. "You need to understand your organization, what your employees really add, and then bring AI to help them. Rote automation is not going to work."
Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen about various factors influencing the global economy, including “the revolution in artificial intelligence, rapidly aging populations, climate change, and a worldwide turn against liberal democracy and a rules-based international order.” Acemoglu explains that: “We are living through a singularly turbulent time.”
A new study co-authored by Prof. Lawrence Schmidt examining AI and job losses found that “AI can successfully complete many of a worker’s job responsibilities but not all,” reports Pattie Hunt Sinacole for Boston.com. “About 14% of roles within a company can be performed by AI, according to Schmidt’s research. However, AI is less effective in tasks where critical thinking may be required,” Hunt Sinacole explains.
Luke Hobson, assistant director of Industrial Design for MIT xPRO, speaks with Inside Higher Ed reporter Emma Whitford about safe and creative ways to use AI technology in the classroom. “For so long, online courses have been the same old, same old—essays and multiple choice questions,” says Hobson. “Now it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s elevate this. Let’s really make this into a whole new type of learning experience to make it better.”