Computer science and technology

MIT researchers have developed Ataraxos, an AI system capable of winning the challenging game Stratego. The system could one day help decision makers with real-world problems that involve hidden information, reports Jacek Krywk for Ars Technica. “Board games have fixed rules and clear winners, while real-world problems like negotiations, financial markets, or military conflicts usually don’t,” writes Krywk. “But the Ataraxos team argues the gap is smaller than it looks, since tackling any real problem starts with building a simplified model of it.” 

Forbes’ Afdhel Aziz highlights Extern, a platform that “helps students graduates and career switchers do real projects for companies,” founded by alumnus Matt Wilkerson ‘04, ‘05. “Nearly 90,000 people have used the platform to build experience they can put on a resume and talk about in an interview,” writes Aziz. “I want to work on a problem that really changes someone’s life in a very deep way, says Wilkerson.  

MIT was listed as the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings,” “based upon the analysis of more than 1,700 colleges and universities nationwide across 17 key measures,” writes MassLive’s Claudia Dimuro. “These measures included ‘First-year retention rates,’ ‘Earnings by major,’ ‘Faculty salaries,’ and ‘Student-faculty ratio,’ notes Dimuro.  

For Boston 25, reporter Alexis Rossi details MIT’s selection as the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings.” “MIT was also ranked first for undergraduate research and creative projects, second on the list of most innovative schools, and third on the list of best value schools,” writes Rossi.  

The U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings” honors MIT as the No.1 national university, writes Elizabeth Mehler for Boston.com. “The rankings are based on up to 17 weighted measures of academic quality and success, including graduation and retention rates, social mobility for low-income students, post-graduate earnings, academic peer assessment, and faculty resources,” writes Mehler. 

7 News Boston spotlights MIT being named the No. 1 national university by U.S. News and World Report for its 2027 “Best College Rankings.” The ranking highlighted MIT’s “high enrollment of just over 4,500 students in 2025, its student faculty ratio of 8-1 and its 4-1 academic calendar.”  

The Boston Globe’s Chloe Craft highlights MIT being ranked No. 1 in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings.” “Take a look at the rankings of U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 lists of the nation’s best universities and liberal arts colleges, released Tuesday, and you’ll find lots of schools from New England near the top of the charts,” writes Craft. “MIT, ranked No. 1 for the first time ever.” 

MIT has been named the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings,” writes Chloe Craft for The Boston Globe. MIT is proud to be “part of a strong network of excellent colleges and universities across the nation, dedicated to educating students and pursuing curiosity-driven research. America’s economic strength, scientific leadership, and national security depend on world-class education and research institutions.” 

Jeffrey Riley, executive director of MIT RAISE’s “Day of AI” K-12 program, speaks to WBUR’s Suevon Lee about the importance of teaching school-aged children AI literacy skills. “Kids need to know about voice clones and deepfakes and plagiarism,” says Riley. “We need to teach kids so that they're healthy skeptics of this technology, that they mistrust and verify the information they're getting from it.”  

MIT alumni Tom Brown ‘10, co-founder of Anthropic, and Edwin Chen ‘08, founder of Surge AI, are highlighted among the 10 youngest billionaires on the 2026 “Forbes 400 List,” by reporter Alicia Park. Brown “was lead author of the 2020 paper introducing GPT-3, the language model that demonstrated such systems could write fluently and triggered the current investment boom in artificial intelligence,” writes Park. Chen’s Surge AI, “employs people to label data, as well as rate and correct AI-generated answers to train models.”

MIT researchers are leading a new project documenting what major AI systems say about elections in an effort to understand how the technology influences the democratic process, writes Tiffany Hsu for The New York Times. “AI is becoming part of the way people encounter and make sense of political information, and yet we know relatively little about what that information environment actually looks like, how it differs for different user demographics, political identities and geographies,” says Prof. Chara Podimata, a leader of the project.  

Akamai will honor their late cofounder Danny Lewin SM ’98, a victim of the American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11, by illuminating their headquarters in blue the evening of Sept. 11, write Jon Chesto and Shirley Leung for The Boston Globe. “Lewin remains revered at Akamai; its highest employee award is given out each year in his honor,” Chesto and Leung write.  

A new study by MIT researchers found that it is impossible to draw a direct link between AI diffusion model outputs and an artist’s body of work, writes Gizmodo’s Webb Wright. “If a [diffusion] model generates something, you want to be able to say, ‘Oh, this part of the training data was responsible,'” says Zheng Dai, PhD ’24, lead author on the study. “It’s important for us to understand how these models work to properly study them or regulate them.” 

Prof. David Gifford and Zheng Dai PhD ’24 discovered that AI diffusion models can replicate the style of an artist even when their work was omitted from datasets, leading to ‘attribution decay,’ writes Fast Company’s Jesus Diaz. “This trend, what the researchers call ‘attribution decay,’ means that artificial intelligence can produce an image that resembles a particular artist’s work, while having no provable causal link to that artist’s actual contribution to the training data,” explains Diaz.