Data

Prof. Alessandro Acquisti speaks with WBUR reporters Woodrow Hartzog and Neil Richards about privacy concerns surrounding consumer data. “The online advertising industry has long extolled the benefits of targeted advertising, presenting it as an economic win-win for publishers, merchants and consumers alike,” says Acquisti. “And yet, in reality, there is little robust empirical evidence that any stakeholder – other than the data intermediaries themselves – actually benefit from this type of advertising.” 

Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and Jerry Lu MFin '24 speak with Eli Chavez of the Boston Business Journal about their work using AI technologies to help athletes improve their performance. Lu notes that the AI tool he created for figure skating allows athletes to not only evaluate themselves, “but it also lets you analyze pretty much everybody in history: your idols, your mentors, your coaches, or even your competitors, and you can make these measurements without having to ask them to do anything.”  

Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and Jerry Lu MFin ’24 speak with Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s Curiosity Desk, about their work at the intersection of sports and technology. “We founded the [MIT] Sports Lab about 10 years ago and the idea was to give MIT students and MIT faculty a chance to apply their technical expertise to problems in sports, to advance the state-of-the-art, to help athletes achieve the maximum that they can achieve,” says Hosoi. 

Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with New York Times reporter Claire Brown about the development of AI data centers and the potential of increased utility costs. “If it’s just a few industrial customers with behind-the-meter power plants, it doesn’t really matter,” says Knittel. [As data centers grow and expand] “these things are going to matter so much. We can get it right, but sadly, too, if we don’t do it right, we can get it really wrong.” 

Jerry Lu MFin ’24 speaks with Fast Company reporter Grace Snelling about his work developing a new AI tool that can be used to help figure skaters land their jumps and Olympic audiences better understand just how challenging a quadruple Axel is. “Some of the artistic sports were missing this data-driven storytelling ability—if you watch hockey on TV, it looks slow, but if you watch it in person, it looks fast,” Lu explains. 

Fortune contributor Andrew Winston highlights an analysis from the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab, part of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, examining the role of sustainability in supply chains. The researchers found that “85% of companies were maintaining or accelerating sustainable supply chain practices.”

Fox Business host Stuart Varney spotlights MIT’s new Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making (AI+D) major, which has quickly become, “the second most popular undergrad major at MIT.” 

Alumnus Jerry Lu and his colleagues have developed OOFSkate, an AI-powered app that can analyze a figure skater’s “jump height, rotation speed, airtime and even landing quality,” reports Dave Skretta for the Associated Press. “Our vision for the system is to automate the technical calling of the sport,” says Lu. “This manifests itself in a combination of using AI-assisted computer vision, but also the knowledge of figure skating, essentially taking out the stuff that should be judged without subjectivity.”

New York Times reporter Natasha Singer spotlights MIT’s new Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making major (AI+D), which is aimed at teaching students to “develop AI systems and study how technologies like robots interact with humans and the environment.” Asu Ozdaglar, head of EECS and the deputy dean of academics for the Schwarzman College of Computing, shares that: “Students who prefer to work with data to address problems find themselves more drawn to an AI major.” 

Prof. Sara Beery spoke at TED Radio Hour about her work developing Inquire, an AI tool aimed at supercharging ecosystem conservation that is trained on millions of photos captured by citizen scientists, reports GBH. “Under the hood, what we’re doing is we’re developing AI models that can learn and understand similarities between images and scientific language,” explains Beery. 

Wall Street Journal reporters Robbie Whelan and Amrith Ramkumar spotlight Lisa Su '90, SM '91, PhD '94, chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, and her impact leading the company into the center of the global AI race. “At the heart of Su’s strategy is her belief that there is ‘insatiable demand’ for computing power, and that as the market for AI grows, the companies offering the best and most reliable AI infrastructure will thrive,” they write. 

Wall Street Journal reporter Angel Au-Yeung spotlights Anysphere, an AI startup founded by Michael Truell '21, Sualeh Asif '22, Arvid Lunnemar '22, and Aman Sanger '22. “The company makes an AI tool that learns a developer’s coding style to help autocomplete, edit and review lines of code,” writes Au-Yeung. 

Michael Truell '21, Sualeh Asif '22, Arvid Lunnemar '22, and Aman Sanger '22 co-founded Anysphere, an AI startup developing Cursor, an AI coding tool that “allows engineers to use AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI to write and edit entire chunks of code as well as identify and fix bugs,” reports Rashi Shrivastava for Forbes. 

Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with Miami Herald reporter Michelle Marchante about online phishing schemes. Madnick explains that while IP addresses can sometimes give a general idea of where a person was when they went online, it’s not a foolproof way to determine their exact location. He adds that anyone can buy a URL and redirect it to another website. 

New York Times reporter Annabel Keenan highlights the “Remembering the Future” exhibit at the MIT Museum, a sculptural installation created by Janet Echelman that uses “climate data from the last ice age to the present, as well as projected future environments, to create a geometric design.” Echelman worked with MIT faculty, including Prof. Raffaele Ferrari and Prof. Caitlin Mueller, to bring the project to life. Mueller explains that she developed a “high-fidelity digital twin of the sculpture generated through our computational simulation that you can orbit and pan through to get perspectives that you can’t see physically in the space.”