Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with WBUR’s Priyanka Dayal McCluskey about her work developing an AI risk detection tool that can analyze mammogram images and help predict risk of breast cancer before it happens or spreads. Barzilay, who describes the tool as a hi-tech weather forecast for breast health, notes that: “We really need to have tools that can help, rather than just staring at an image and trying to guess.”
Sybil, a new AI tool developed by researchers from MIT and Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, “analyzes a single CT scan and generates a risk score predicting the likelihood of developing lung cancer over a period of up to six years,” reports Ivan Rodriguez for WCVB-TV. “In 2023, researchers reported that Sybil achieved an accuracy rate of 86% to 94% in distinguishing high-risk patients from low-risk patients within a year.”
Cambridge Day reporter Zoe Beketova, a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, visits Prof. Xuanhe Zhao’s lab to get a hands-on look at the group’s ultrasound wristband that can map movements of the human body using sound waves, part of the group’s work aimed at changing “how we gather information from inside the body.” Says Zhao: “The mission of my lab is really merging humans with machines and AI. We believe there’s a huge opportunity [with] this interface.”
Fortune reporter Preston Fore spotlights Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee’s remarks warning against using AI technologies to replace entry level jobs. “How else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning and training apprenticeship?” said McAfee. “That’s how you learn to do difficult knowledge work is by helping somebody who’s good at that with the routine stuff. And when we put too much automation in that too quickly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder.”
Reporting for CNN, Caleb Hellerman spotlights how MIT computer scientists developed an AI program called Sybil that can “‘look’ at a single CT scan and generate a ‘risk score’ corresponding to the likelihood of the person developing cancer over any period up to six years.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Slate’s “Money Talks” podcast to explain his research into pro-worker technologies and how we can not only avoid the AI job apocalypse but also improve workers’ lives by shifting the goal of AI from automation to collaboration. “Artificial intelligence is quite different than human intelligence,” says Acemoglu. “And when two things are different, a natural way to combine them is in a complimentary way.”
Prof. Xuanhe Zhao speaks with Tech Briefs reporter Andrew Corselli about his team’s work developing an ultrasound wristband that precisely tracks a wearer’s hand movements in real time and can communicate device these motions to a robot or a virtual environment. “For the future of human society, humanized robots will do lots of different work for us. For that work, we need a dexterous robotic hand,” explains Zhao. “We believe this ultrasound wristband, based on variable imaging, could be the future of really knowing the human hand motions.”
President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif writes for The Boston Globe that with the advent of transformative AI, there is an urgent need for “a bilateral conversation between Washington and Beijing, focused on the shared dangers these technologies pose to each nation and to global stability. Both governments must work toward agreed guardrails, defining not just how this technology should be used but where it must never be applied. Red lines need to be defined, established, and agreed upon.”
In discussion with Deni Ellis Bechard for Scientific American, Prof. Emeritus Rodney Brooks shares his thoughts on a robot that ran a half marathon faster than a human. “When you see a performance of an AI system or a robot on one thing, that fools us into thinking that it has the same general competence as a human,” says Brooks. “And that’s a mistake people make.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Mark Herz, host of GBH Morning Edition, about the potential benefits and issues associated with using AI in medicine. “Where I really see a lot of fantastic opportunity is identifying spaces where humans don’t have a fundamental capacity, like early breast cancer detection where it’s a sub-clinical presentation,” says Ghassemi. “These are spaces where humans cannot do or have been proven not to be good at a very specific clinical task. And there, AI can really help close the gap.”
Prof. Thomas Malone and his colleagues at MIT Sloan have developed a way to analyze work, which may help predict which jobs are likely most vulnerable to AI. The researchers found that “AI mainly threatens workers who manage information. But not all of them,” writes Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Malone noted that some industries demand human empathy, a sense of ethics, and a knack for teamwork. That’s why he thinks health care jobs are relatively safe.”
Prof. Andrew Lo speaks with with Greg Iacurci at CNBC about using AI for personal finances. “One of the things about [large language models] that I find particularly concerning is that no matter what you ask it, it’ll always come back with an answer that sounds authoritative, even if it’s not,” said Lo. ″[People] should be using AI for financial planning — but it’s how they use it that’s important.”
President Sally Kornbluth joins Sloan Senior Lecturer Brian Halligan MBA ’05 on his podcast “Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO” to chat leadership strategies, AI and education, and MIT's approach to preparing students for life after college. “People talk to me, alums talk to me about how MIT changed their lives. It's not because of some particular class or some particular skill they acquired. It’s the whole environment,” Kornbluth notes. She adds that when it comes to educating students, at MIT "we want them to have the kind of knowledge base and ability to navigate the world that will enable them to do anything they want to do.”
MIT researchers have developed a new traffic navigation system that more accurately reflects travel time by including parking data, reports Catherine Parotta for Boston 25. “What we can do is figure out if you’re best off trying this parking lot first, even if it’s farther than the closest parking lot,” explains Prof. Cathy Wu. Graduate student Cameron Hickert adds that: “We hope that this can help people make better decisions."
Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg highlights research by MIT economists that finds “automation doesn’t affect all parts of a job equally. The critical variable is whether the tasks being automated are the expert parts of a role or the administrative scaffolding around them.”