Wired reporter Aarian Marshall highlights how MIT is launching a new undergraduate major that will combine computer science and urban planning. Prof. Eran Ben-Joseph explains that the motivation for the major is studying how, “you make a better connection between the training and computation, and what the implication of the work will be, for communities, for policies.”
BBC reporter Dave Edmonds speaks to Prof. Esther Duflo, co-founder of J-PAL, about her use of field studies and randomized control trials to test the effectiveness of programs in developing countries. Duflo explains that by examining data from randomized control trials, “out of the noise emerges some kind of melody of the logic of behavior.”
Institute Prof. Sheila Widnall co-chaired a new report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which examines the prevalence of sexual harassment in higher ed. The authors “call for a ‘systemwide change to the culture and climate in higher education’ in order to address the issue and prevent harassment,” report Ellie Kaufman and Evan Simko-Bednarski for CNN.
Data USA, a website built by Associate Prof. César Hidalgo in collaboration with Deloitte and Datawheel, provides prospective college students with comprehensive data on U.S. universities, revealing “metrics on topics like the most popular degrees, the breakdown of faculty by gender, the student loan default rate, and the amount of federal funding universities receive,” writes Katharine Schwab for Co.Design.
Writing for The Verge, Angela Chen highlights advances in AI that are allowing researchers to discover and understand new materials at a rapid pace. Chen cites a study co-authored by Assistant Prof. Elsa Olivetti, who “developed a machine-learning system that scans academic papers to figure out which ones include instructions for making certain materials.”
The Human Cell Atlas, compiled by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has released its first batch of data with details of 530,000 immune system cells, writes Jason Daley of Smithsonian. New computational methods “allowed scientists to tackle… about 100 times as many cells as most cell-sequencing experiments handle,” explains Daley.
In a commentary for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Alex "Sandy" Pentland and Thomas Hardjono write about digital identities and the risks associated with how they are authenticated. “The mistake that both governments and tech pioneers are making is failing to realize that trustworthy identity depends on jointly-issued credentials,” they explain.
In a forthcoming book excerpted in The Guardian, Alex Beard describes Prof. Deb Roy's project to record his infant son's learning behaviors. Beard explains that while Roy set out to create machines that learned like humans, he was ultimately blown away by "the incredible sophistication of what a language learner in the flesh actually looks like and does." "The learning process wasn’t decoding, as he had originally thought, but something infinitely more continuous, complex and social."
Endor, a spin-out that originally began at the Media Lab, has acquired $45 million in token pre-sales for its “blockchain-based predictive analytics technology” notes Reuters. “Endor’s platform allows users to key in questions and get predictions as answers. Its tokens can be spent by individuals and data owners to access predictions.”
Cogito, a Media Lab spinout, is used by MetLife to “detect signs of distress and other emotions in a customer’s voice,” writes Tom Simonite for Wired. The program helps customer service representatives more consistently use an appropriate tone when handling often sensitive customer calls.
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is utilizing cloud computing to support its genomic sequencing programs, which “allows for large-scale data processing, and makes it easier for researchers to share data securely,” writes Steven Norton for The Wall Street Journal. Currently, the Institute has reduced the cost of genome processing on the cloud from about $45 to $5.
The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has expanded to show interest in virtual reality, machine learning, and artificial learning, reports Alex Speier of The Boston Globe. The work highlighted at the conference “is in some ways breathtaking, with sports understood in ways that seemed unimaginable at the start of the century,” writes Speier.
Spun out of Sloan’s Billion Prices Project, PriceStats tracks millions of items sold online and produces a daily measure of U.S. consumer prices, allowing investors to track inflation faster.“By producing a daily index of prices…it has a considerable jump on figures that government entities calculate monthly,” writes Eric Morath of the Wall Street Journal.
Danny Crichton of TechCrunch highlights Media Lab researchers Kent Larson and John Clippinger, who are sorting socio-economic factors into datasets in order to create a model that can guide a community towards success. “Wouldn’t it be great to create an alternative where instead of optimizing for financial benefits, we could optimize for social benefits, and cultural benefits, and environmental benefits,” said Larson.
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Visiting Lecturer Irving Wladawsky-Berger spotlights MIT’s AI and the Future of Work Conference. Wladawsky-Berger writes that participants, “generally agreed that AI will have a major impact on jobs and the very nature of work. But, for the most part, they viewed AI as mostly augmenting rather than replacing human capabilities.”