Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Malcom Ritter of the Associated Press reports on how scientists have developed a new family tree for most of the bird species alive today, providing new insight into evolutionary history. Research conducted by Dr. Andreas Pfenning “found that birds with this "vocal learning" ability share some similarities with humans in the activity of certain genes in the brain.”

Cory Bennett of The Hill writes about a broad effort to tackle cybersecurity challenges at MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. “MIT will examine the immediate policy concerns, such as how to protect vulnerable financial and medical data, as well as emerging technologies like self-driving cars and drones,” explains Bennett.

BostInno’s Elise Harmon writes that a $15 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to MIT could “help pave the way for a comprehensive cybersecurity policy.” The gift to MIT is part of $45 million in total to MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley as part of the foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

MIT’s Daniel Weitzner speaks with BetaBoston’s Nidhi Subbaraman about a new cybersecurity policy initiative supported by the Hewlett Foundation. Weitzner explains that researchers will examine what kind of laws and public policy are needed to make “[technologies] more trustworthy.” 

Robert J. Szczerba of Forbes reports on how cameras are changing health care, featuring new work from researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. The researchers are developing a new technique to measure heart rate via subtle head movements, Szczerba writes. 

BBC News reporter Chris Neiger writes that MIT researchers have developed a new traffic management system to help drivers avoid congested roads. “According to field trials, the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-based traffic solution resulted in an 8% increase in overall vehicle speed,” write Neiger. 

Shankar Vedantam of NPR reports on Dr. Boris Katz’s new research examining how errors in written English can reveal clues about other languages. “By analyzing the patterns of mistakes that native speakers of two languages make in English, the computer can say, look, these two languages might actually be related to one another,” Vedantam explains. 

“Inspired by octopus tentacles, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)'s latest robot is as squishy as can be,” writes Rachel Feltman of The Washington Post. “Like other soft robots, this tentacle has potential in search and rescue missions.”

Thomas Tamblyn of The Huffington Post reports on a soft, tentacle-shaped robot developed by doctoral candidate Andrew Marchese and PhD student Robert Katzschmann: “The arm is made using purely silicone which is then inflated and deflated forcing the arm to move in the desired direction.”

Francie Diep writes for Popular Science about a soft robot designed by MIT’s Distributed Systems Lab, that is able to navigate a maze unaided: “Researchers that build soft robots like this one hope that in the future, soft machines will be safer for humans to work with than hard metal ones.”

Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston writes about a soft, tentacle-shaped robot created by the Distributed Systems Lab at MIT that is able to navigate autonomously. “[T]he robot can make its way from one side of a pipe maze to another without humans getting involved,” writes Subbaraman.

Charles Pulliam-Moore of the PBS NewsHour reports on new research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab showing that humans are happier and more productive when robots are in control.  The research, “could lead to situations in which human employees could be empowered by machines, rather than replaced by them,” Pulliam-Moore writes. 

Drake Bennett of Bloomberg Businessweek reports on how a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard have created a robot that can self-assemble from a flat sheet of paper in four minutes. The robot is made of paper, and layered with a circuit board and prestretched polystyrene, the same material used to create Shrinky Dinks, Bennett explains. 

Bloomberg Businessweek spotlights the new self-folding, mobile robot developed by MIT and Harvard researchers. The design for the robot was inspired by origami and the team used inexpensive and easily accessible materials to build the robot, Bloomberg reports. 

Joseph Flaherty of Wired takes a close look at the design of MIT’s self-assembling robots. “[T]hese researchers are promoting a new kind of manufacturing where engineers can elegantly specify a design and watch it spring to life like a seed emerging from the ground,” writes Flaherty.