Aviva Rutkin writes for New Scientist about algorithms developed by MIT graduate student Karthik Dinakar that can detect abusive speech in online comments. "We need better tools not just for monitoring, but also to tell people what good digital citizenry is all about,” says Dinakar.
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.”
Joe Lazauskas writes for Forbes about MIT being named the top school for students looking to enter information technology fields. “MIT boasted the only perfect score in U.S. News & World Report rankings,” writes Lazauskas.
In a piece for USA Today about College Factual’s list of the top computer science schools in the U.S., Madison Mills writes about MIT being named the top destination for computer science majors. “MIT is in Cambridge, Mass. and offers a breathtaking campus in a mid-size city,” writes Mills.
Colleen DeBaise writes for The Huffington Post about a week-long summer program hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum that introduces high school girls to tech entrepreneurship. "I love promoting women entrepreneurs,” says Lori Hoberman, the chair of the Enterprise Forum’s New York chapter. “We don't have enough of them.”
Katie Collins writes for Wired that MIT researchers have developed a system that allows people to choose exactly what information they share online. “The primary benefit of this is that you as an individual would not be able to be identified from an anonymised dataset,” writes Collins.
R. Colin Johnson of EE Times reports that MIT researchers are, “aiming for a multicore architecture that can scale to any number of cores, with cache coherency. So far, they've prototyped a 36-core version.”
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray reports on the 50th anniversary of MIT’s Project MAC. “When this started in 1963, the dream was to let multiple people use computers simultaneously,” Daniela Rus explains. “Fifty years later we’re now in a world where we find computing indispensable.”
Newsweek reporter Tom Parrett writes about current advances, and the future of swarm robots, highlighting Professor Daniela Rus’ work with self-assembling robots.
In a video for BBC News, Spencer Kelly reports on how, “A researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed an algorithm which he says can predict how popular a photograph will be when it is posted online.”
In this Wired piece, Nicholas Tufnell reports on MIT work to analyze animated GIFS in an attempt to create a new language from the animated symbols.
A new programming language with built-in privacy protocols could help prevent your personal information from being compromised, reports Klint Fliney for Wired. The system, dubbed Jeeves, was developed by MIT PhD student Jean Yang.