National Geographic reporter Maya Wei-Haas explores how the ancient art of origami is being applied to fields such a robotics, medicine and space exploration. Wei-Haas notes that Prof. Daniela Rus and her team developed a robot that can fold to fit inside a pill capsule, while Prof. Erik Demaine has designed complex, curving fold patterns. “You get these really impressive 3D forms with very simple creasing,” says Demaine.
NBC 1st Look host Chelsea Cabarcas visits MIT to learn more about how faculty, researchers and students are “pioneering the world of tomorrow.” Cabarcas meets the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle team and gets a peek at Nimbus, the single-occupant vehicle that team members raced in the American Solar Challenge from Kansas City to New Mexico. Cabarcas also sees the back-flipping MIT mini cheetah that could one day be used in disaster-relief operations.
Graduate student Matthew Groh discusses Detect Fakes, a research project he co-created aimed at teaching people how to detect deepfakes, with Wall Street Journal reporter Ann-Marie Alcántara. Groh recommends people pay attention to the context of an image or video, noting that people can “pay attention to incentives and what someone is saying and why someone might be saying this.”
A review led Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi has found that a major issue in health-related machine learning models “is the relative scarcity of publicly available data sets in medicine,” reports Emily Sohn for Nature.
Researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the Harvard Natural Language Processing Group developed the Giant Language model Test Room (GLTR), an algorithm that attempts to detect if text was written by a bot, reports Megan Morrone for Fast Company. “Using the ‘it takes one to know one’ method, if the GLTR algorithm can predict the next word in a sentence, then it will assume that sentence has been written by a bot,” explains Morrone.
Vecna Technologies and Vecna Robotics co-founder Daniel Theobald ’95, MS ’97 speaks with Forbes reporter Heather Wishart-Smith about the future of robotics. “I believe that robotics can be one of the great tools for solving the world’s problems,” says Theobald. “The environment, equality, food scarcity, even happiness in allowing us to focus on being more human than today’s humans working like machines and doing jobs that really should not be done by humans.”
Alumnus Jeremy Bilotti co-founded Rarify, a design furniture retail company, reports Lauren Mowery for Forbes. “Rarify uses the history of design to tell a story, educate our audience about the importance of notable designers, and push toward the future, bringing to light noteworthy manufacturers and designers that aren’t known or recognized to the degree that they deserve,” explains Rarify co-founder David Rosenwasser. Alumnus Jeremy Bilotti co-founded Rarify, a design furniture retail company, reports Lauren Mowery for Forbes. “Rarify uses the history of design to tell a story, educate our audience about the importance of notable designers, and push toward the future, bringing to light noteworthy manufacturers and designers that aren’t known or recognized to the degree that they deserve,” explains Rarify co-founder David Rosenwasser.
MIT spinout Gaia A is developing a forest management building tool aimed at providing foresters with the resources to make data-driven decisions, reports Haje Jan Kamps and Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “The company is currently using lidar and computer vision tech to gather data but is ultimately building a data platform to tackle some of the big questions in forestry,” writes Kamps and Heater.
Rosina Samadani ’89, MS ’92 co-developed EyeBox, an algorithm-based non-invasive diagnostic test for concussions, reports Geri Stengel for Forbes. “Patients watch a video, and the device watches their eyes for 220 seconds with a very high-quality, high-frequency infrared camera that measures eye movements and provides a score based on those eye movements,” explains Stengel. “The score is correlated with the absence or presence of a concussion.”
Research affiliate Ramin Hasani speaks with Kimberly Adams of Marketplace about how he and his CSAIL colleagues solved a differential equation dating back to the early 1900s, enabling researchers to create an AI algorithm that can learn on the spot and adapt to evolving patterns. The new algorithm “will enable larger-scale brain simulations,” Hasani explains.
Fortune reporter Sydney Lake spotlights MIT’s free online “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python” course. “The course also covers topics including data structures and simple algorithms,” writes Lake.
Boston Globe correspondent Scott Kirsner explores the growth of quantum computing from the field's roots “at a 1981 meeting in Dedham, at MIT’s Endicott House conference center.” Bharath Kannan PhD ’22, co-founder and CEO of Atlantic Quantum, notes that if researchers could develop a computer that was natively quantum mechanical, "it would be game-changing for a lot of industries.”
Popular Science reporter Charlotte Hu writes that MIT researchers have developed a new machine learning model that can depict how the sound around a listener changes as they move through a certain space. “We’re mostly modeling the spatial acoustics, so the [focus is on] reverberations,” explains graduate student Yilun Du. “Maybe if you’re in a concert hall, there are a lot of reverberations, maybe if you’re in a cathedral, there are many echoes versus if you’re in a small room, there isn’t really any echo.”
Prof. Emeritus Tim Berners-Lee spoke at Lisbon’s Web Summit conference about Solid, an “open-sourced gambit to reinvent the web through new decentralized privacy-minded tools for wrangling data,” reports Harry McCracken for Fast Company. Solid was originally started as an MIT research project.
Scientists at MIT have developed “a machine learning model that can capture how sounds in a room will propagate through space,” report Kyle Wiggers and Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch. “By modeling the acoustics, the system can learn a room’s geometry from sound recordings, which can then be used to build a visual rendering of a room,” write Wiggers and Coldewey.