Prof. David Autor speaks with Bloomberg about the future of generative AI and the technology’s potential impact on productivity and the labor market. “When we interact with AI, we need to learn how to treat it not as authoritative, but as a guide to support decision making, and that’s really critical,” says Autor.
MIT researchers have found that job applicants who used AI to improve spelling and grammar on their resumes were eight percent more likely to be hired, reports Bryan Robinson for Forbes. “If you take two identical workers with the same skills and background, the one with the better-written resume is more likely to get hired,” explains graduate student Emma van Inwegen. “The takeaway is that employers actually care about the writing in the resume; it’s not just a correlation.”
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere developed an artificial intelligence predictive model that can be used to detect which strains of Covid-19 could become dominant and lead to a new wave of illness, reports Ruth Reader, Carmen Paun, Daniel Payne and Eric Schumaker for Politico. The model, “found three strong predictors of a dominant variant: the number of infections a strain causes in its first week relative to the number of times it appears in sequencing, the number of mutations in the spike protein, and the number of weeks since the current dominant variant began circulating,” they note.
Former Postdoc Rana el Kaliouby speaks with Boston Globe reporter Janelle Nanos about her work focused on infusing emotional intelligence into AI. “I’m an optimist, but I’m a realist as well, and I can see where this can go wrong,” says Kaliouby. “I think one of the biggest concerns around AI is bias and how we’re building bias into these models and then deploying them at scale everywhere around the world.”
Prof. Manolis Kellis speaks with Brian Bergstein of The Boston Globe’s “Say More” podcast about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on biological advances and medicine. “I would say there is no way to answer biological questions without computational science nowadays,” says Kellis. “The genome and all of the technologies that it enabled transformed biology into an information-based discipline.”
Dynamic Labs, co-founded by Itai Turbahn '11 and Yoni Goldberg '09, MEng '10, offers “tech for crypto and non-crypto companies alike to create seamless login experiences backed by digital wallets,” reports Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez for Fortune. “The firm’s wallet-based business is twofold,” explains Quiroz-Gutierrez. “It offers a customizable all-in-one service that can either push the crypto wallet technology to the background for less savvy users or put it front and center for Web3 natives.”
Prof. Manolis Kellis speaks with USA Today reporter Josh Peter about the potential impact of AI in developing undetectable performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). "The most feasible approach would be using generative AI to alter existing PEDs that trigger drug tests in a way that makes those drugs undetectable by current testing technology,” Kellis notes.
Axios reporter Ina Fried spotlights a new report by Prof. Emeritus Stuart Madnick that finds “2.6 billion personal records have been exposed in data breaches over the past two years and that number continues to grow.” Additionally, Madnick found that” “Data breaches in the US through the first nine months of the year are already 20% higher than for all of 2022.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new AI technique for teaching robots to pack items into a limited space while adhering to a range of constraints, reports Nick Hilden for Scientific American. “We want to have a learning-based method to solve constraints quickly because learning-based [AI] will solve faster, compared to traditional methods,” says graduate student Zhutian “Skye” Yang.
Writing for Politico, MIT Prof. Armando Solar-Lezama and University of Texas at Austin Prof. Swarat Chaudhuri examine the recent executive order on AI. “Especially as new ways to train models with limited resources emerge, and as the price of computing goes down,” they write, “such regulations could start hurting the outsiders — the researchers, small companies, and other independent organizations whose work will be necessary to keep a fast-moving technology in check.”
Four faculty members from across MIT - Professors Song Han, Simon Johnson, Yoon Kim and Rosalind Picard - speak with Curiosity Stream about the opportunities and risks posed by the rapid advancements in the field of AI. “We do want to think about which human capabilities we treasure,” says Picard. She adds that during the Covid-19 pandemic, “we saw a lot of loss of people's ability to communicate with one another face-to-face when their world moved online. I think we need to be thoughtful and intentional about what we're building with the technology and whether it's diminishing who we are or enhancing it.”
Forbes contributor Lucio Ribeiro spotlights Andrew Ng MS '98 and Jaime Teevan SM '01, PhD '07 as two of eight “AI superheroes whose work is transforming technology and challenges our understanding of what’s possible.” Ng is the CEO is Landing AI, and “his efforts in educating the masses about AI through platforms like Coursera, which he co-founded, have democratized AI knowledge, bridging the gap between academia and industry,” writes Ribeiro. Teevan’s “work is focused on making AI more accessible and useful to people in their everyday lives.”
MIT researchers have “used an algorithm to sort through millions of genomes to find new, rare types of CRISPR systems that could eventually be adapted into genome-editing tools,” writes Sara Reardon for Nature. “We are just amazed at the diversity of CRISPR systems,” says Prof. Feng Zhang. “Doing this analysis kind of allows us to kill two birds with one stone: both study biology and also potentially find useful things.”
Prof. Russ Tedrake and Max Bajracharya '21 MEng '21 speak with TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater about the impact of generative AI on the future of robotics. “Generative AI has the potential to bring revolutionary new capabilities to robotics,” says Tedrake. “Not only are we able to communicate with robots in natural language, but connecting to internet-scale language and image data is giving robots a much more robust understanding and reasoning about the world.”
Prof. Héctor Beltrán speaks with Lily Jamali of Marketplace about his new book, “Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands,” which explores the culture of hackathons and entrepreneurship in Mexico. "Ultimately, it’s about difference, thinking about Silicon Valley from Mexico,” says Beltrán. "Also, from a Chicano/Latino perspective, because as I show throughout the book, there’s these connections, tensions, intersections between the Latino community in the U.S., the Latin American community, the Mexican community.”