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Boston Globe reporter Emily Sweeney writes about the opening of a time capsule housed at MIT’s Stata Center. The capsule held an “array of tech treasures, including the original 1992 proposal for the World Wide Web; a 1979 user manual for VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program developed by MIT alumni Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin; and an Altair BASIC interpreter that was donated by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.”
CSAIL unsealed a time capsule containing artifacts from computing history at MIT after a self-taught programmer cracked the capsule’s cryptopuzzle, reports Kathryn Sotnik for NECN. MIT alumnus, Bob Frankston, who programmed the first electronic spreadsheet, noted “it’s really a reminder in a sense how long ago it was, and how much people today take these things for granted.”
Eric Kane reports for 7 News on how a time capsule at the Stata Center was unsealed at MIT this week after a Belgium programmer solved the cryptopuzzle sealing the container. The time capsule contained “MIT computing artifacts and material relating to the invention of the Internet, the ethernet, and the digital spreadsheet.”
Bloomberg News reporter Carol Massar spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a robot that can identify and sort recyclables. “The system includes a soft Teflon hand that uses tactile sensors to detect the size of an object and the pressure needed to grasp it,” Massar reports. “From there it can determine if it’s made of metal, paper or plastic.”
WCVB-TV’s Jennifer Eagan reports that researchers from MIT and MGH have developed a deep learning model that can predict a patient’s risk of developing breast cancer in the future from a mammogram image. Prof. Regina Barzilay explains that the model “can look at lots of pixels and variations of the pixels and capture very subtle patterns.”
Scientific American reporter Jeremy Hsu highlights how CSAIL researchers have developed a robot that can automatically sort recycling. The robot “uses soft Teflon ‘fingers,’ which have fingertip sensors to detect object size and stiffness,” Hsu explains.
MIT researchers have identified a new method to engineer neural networks in a way that allows them to be a tenth of the size of current networks without losing any computational ability, reports Avery Thompson for Popular Mechanics. “The breakthrough could allow other researchers to build AI that are smaller, faster, and just as smart as those that exist today,” Thompson explains.
HealthDay News reporter Amy Norton writes that MIT researchers have developed an AI system that can help predict a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer and provide more personalized care. “If you know a woman is at high risk, maybe she can be screened more frequently, or be screened using MRI,” explains graduate student Adam Yala.
Writing for The Washington Post, postdoctoral associate Gregory Falco argues that the computer systems operating satellites are vulnerable to cyberattacks. “Computer systems running our satellites haven’t kept up, making them prime targets for an attack,” warns Falco. “This makes our space assets a massive vulnerability — and it could get much worse if we’re not careful.”
Boston Globe reporter Emily Sweeney writes that a programmer has cracked a 20-year-old cryptographic puzzle that was created to celebrate 35 years of research at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (now CSAIL). When he created the puzzle, Prof. Ron Rivest expected it would require “35 years of continuous computation to solve, with the computer being replaced every year by the next fastest model available.”
A cryptographic puzzle used to seal a time capsule at the Stata Center has been solved, reports Tim Caputo for WHDH News. Prof. Ron Rivest explains that the puzzle is based on a fairly simple operation. “Multiply a number by itself, divide by a third number and take the remainder,” he explains. “But, you do that over and over and over again.”
A cryptographic puzzle developed to honor MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (now CSAIL) has been cracked by a programmer from Belgium, reports Spencer Buell for Boston Magazine. Buell explains that the answer to the puzzle reveals a “‘secret message’ that unlocks a time capsule designed by architect Frank Gehry, which contains geeky artifacts contributed by early computing luminaries, including Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee.”
Wired reporter Daniel Oberhaus spotlights how a programmer has solved the cryptographic puzzle that was used to ceremonially seal a time capsule of early computer history at the Ray and Maria Stata Center. The puzzle, which was designed by Institute Professor Ron Rivest, “involved finding the number that results from running a squaring operation nearly 80 trillion times.”
In this video, Reuters explores how MIT researchers have developed a robot that can automatically sort recycling. The robot uses a pressure sensor to squeeze items to determine how they should be sorted.
BBC Click spotlights how CSAIL researchers have developed a robot that can automatically sort recycling. “Many paper and plastic cups look the same, but by introducing the ability to squeeze the object and to know whether it is flexible or not we are able to go one step beyond what today’s methods can do, explains Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL.