Computing

Members of MassLive’s “25 Most Influential Innovators of 2026” list, which includes President Sally Kornbluth and a number of other MIT faculty and alumni, gathered at the MIT Museum to “discuss the forces shaping the future of innovation in Massachusetts,” writes reporter Tréa Lavery. “MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan said about half of undergraduate students at the school are studying some form of computing, and enrollment in those courses has gone up in recent years, prompting professors and administrators to rethink how they incorporate AI into their teaching,” writes Lavery.  

Writing for IEEE Spectrum, reporter Matthew S. Smith highlights Fractal, a new operating system hand-coded by CSAIL researchers to provide a clear view of security vulnerabilities. “We paved the way with techniques such as custom kernel patches and kernel extensions,” says graduate student Joseph Ravichandran. “The dream was always to have a completely custom operating system which would make these hacks unnecessary.”

Margaret Hamilton is included on National Geographic’s list of female coders “whose careful calculations led to many of the world's greatest technological advances,” writes Catherine Zuckerman. Hamilton “led the team at MIT whose software systems were critical to the success of the Apollo 11 mission.”

MIT researchers are developing a new computer chip to increase efficiency and decrease the carbon footprint of cloud computing, reports Daniela Hernandez for The Huffington Post. Hernandez explains that the chip “uses light, instead of electricity, as the highway for information.”

According to the CBC, MIT graduate student Natasha Jaques co-created a computer application called Smile Tracker that “runs in the background of a person's computer and detects when a person smiles.” The app snaps and saves a screenshot of whatever image caused the grin. 

Deborah Douglas, the director of collections and curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum, speaks with WGBH about history of the slide rule. "The slide rule is an instrument that was used to design virtually everything," says Douglas. "The size of a sewer pipe, the weight-bearing ability of a cardboard box, even rocket ships and cars."