Computer science and technology

Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Fortune reporter Jacqueline Munis about the risks of using generative AI to address human emotions, such as grief. 

Prof. Robert Langer, Prof. Giovanni Traverso and former postdoctoral fellow Thomas von Erlach founded Vivtex, a biotechnology startup that has “created a high-tech system called a ‘GI tract on a chip’ that uses robotics and AI to test how drugs move through the human digestive system,” reports Beth Treffeisen for Boston.com. “The technology allows Vivtex to quickly test thousands of drug formulations and predict how they will be absorbed in people, much more accurately than traditional lab methods.” 

Profs. Robert Langer, Giovanni Traverso and former postdoctoral fellow Thomas von Erlach have founded Vivtex, a biotechnology startup specializing in “oral alternatives to drugs administered by injections,” reports Jonathan Satlzman for The Boston Globe. Vivtex, now working in collaboration with Novo Nordisk, is looking to develop a new class of “pills to treat obesity and diabetes,” explains Saltzman. 

Kalshi and Común, two startups founded by MIT alumni, have been named to the 2026 Forbes Fintech 50 list. Kalshi is a prediction market that “had 1.2 million active users in 2025, and total trading volume hit $24 billion” while Común “offers digital banking geared toward Hispanic immigrants,” reports Jeff Kauflin for Forbes. 

“In Event of Moon Disaster,” a short deepfake film on display at the MIT Museum’s “AI: Mind the Gap” exhibit depicts an alternate reality where the Apollo 11 mission ended in disaster, reports Mark Feeney for The Boston Globe. The “unnervingly realistic deepfake” depicts President Richard Nixon addressing the nation regarding the failed mission. The film “manages to be both frightening, in showing how convincing deepfakes can be, and, however paradoxically, inspiring,” writes Feeney. 

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn speaks with The Guardian reporter Andrew Gregory about the lack of safety warnings and disclaimers in AI overviews, specifically in AI-generated health materials. “The absence of disclaimers when users are initially served medical information creates several critical dangers,” says Pataranutaporn. “Disclaimers serve as a crucial intervention point. They disrupt this automatic trust and prompt users to engage more critically with the information they receive.”

Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Deb Roy explores the impact of chatbots on language and learning development. “The ordinary forces that tether speech to consequence—social sanction, legal penalty, reputational loss—presuppose a continuous agent whose future can be made worse by what they say,” writes Roy. “With LLMs, there is no such locus. …When the speaker is an LLM, the human stakes that ordinarily anchor speech have nowhere to attach.” 

President Sally Kornbluth and MIT Corporation member Noubar Afeyan PhD '87 served as panelists at the 2026 Davos Imagination in Action event to discuss “upholding scientific principles in the era of LLMs,” reports John Werner for Forbes. “We want all of our students to have a foundational facility with AI,” said Kornbluth. “What we want them to know, now, is how they can really be passionate about the content that they care about, whether it's materials design, whether it's aerospace, whether it's biochemical innovation, and understanding the many ways in which AI can help in that innovation.”

Researchers at MIT have “developed a new technique that enables large language models to learn new skills and knowledge without forgetting their past capabilities,” reports Ben Dickson for Venture Beat. “Their technique, called self-distillation fine-tuning (SDFT), allows models to learn directly from demonstrations and their own experiments by leveraging the inherent in-context learning abilities of modern LLMs,” explains Dickson. “Experiments show that SDFT consistently outperforms traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while addressing the limitations of reinforcement learning algorithms.” 

USA Today reporter Dinah Voyles Pulver spotlights Research Scientist Judah Cohen’s research studying how weather systems and climate patterns are related to the increase in Arctic blasts and deep freezes this winter. 

Research Scientist Judah Cohen speaks with New York Times reporter Eric Niiler about his research studying “how global warming might also be causing colder winters in the eastern United States.” Cohen says “It’s weird what’s going on now in the stratosphere. These stretching events happen every winter, but just how the pattern is stuck is really remarkable.” 

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.”

In a roundup of the biggest tech breakthroughs of 2025, Forbes reporter Alex Knapp spotlights how MIT engineers developed magnetic transistors, a “discovery [that] could enable faster and more energy-efficient semiconductors.”

Researchers at MIT have “found a way to transform a flat sheet into a functional 3D object with a single pull of a string,” reports Luis Prada for Vice. “The team developed a computational method that lets users design three-dimensional objects that can be fabricated as flat grids and then deployed almost instantly with a single tug,” explains Prada. 

Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of material that can transform into a 3D structure with the simple pull of a string, reports Gayoung Lee for Gizmodo. The new material could “have an impressive range of applications, from transportable medical devices and foldable robots to modular space habitats on Mars,” Lee explains.