To encourage safer driving in Boston, Mayor Martin Walsh has announced a competition that uses a smartphone app developed by MIT startup Cambridge Telematics to reward driver performance, reports Dante Ramos for The Boston Globe. The app gives motorists “star ratings if they stay off their phones; drive at reasonable speeds; and brake, accelerate, and turn carefully.”
In this video, CNN spotlights how researchers from MIT’s Senseable City Lab have developed a robot, named Luigi, to collect bacteria from the sewers in an effort to better understand public health. "Sewers represent a unique opportunity where health data from everybody in a community is pooled together,” explains Prof. Eric Alm.
MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm to create videos from still images, writes G. Clay Whittaker for Popular Science. “The system "learns" types of videos (beach, baby, golf swing...) and, starting from still images, replicates the movements that are most commonly seen in those videos,” Whittaker explains.
Emma Grey Ellis writes for Wired that MIT researchers are aiming to get a better grasp on public health in cities around the world by analyzing the microbes in sewage systems using a robot dubbed Luigi. Wilson explains that sewage “carries drug metabolites, DNA, even biomarkers for diabetes—and all that data is available in real time.”
MIT researchers have developed a new system for protecting patient privacy in genomic databases, reports Anna Nowogrodzki for Nature. The system “masks the donor's identity by adding a small amount of noise, or random variation, to the results it returns on a user’s query,” Nowogrodzki explains.
Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland speaks with Tom Ashbrook, host of NPR’s On Point, about his study examining friendship. “If you’re trying to lose weight…50 percent of the time you are likely to reach out to people who really actually aren’t going to help that much,” Pentland explains, adding that people should be looking to mutual friendships for support.
A team of MIT researchers has received an EPA grant to install a network of air quality sensors to study Hawaii’s volcanic smog, reports Greenwire’s Sean Reilly. The sensors will provide residents with real-time information as well as “a data set that can be used to explore pollutant variability and other topics,” explains Reilly.
The EPA has awarded a team of MIT researchers a grant to create a network of low-cost, air pollution sensors, according to the Associated Press. The network will test and track emissions from the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, which emits high levels of sulfur dioxide, reducing air quality and negatively impacting human health and crops.
Prof. Jonathan How speaks with Boston Globe reporter Steve Annear about how researchers from MIT and Ford are collaborating on a new project aimed at better understanding vehicle mobility and demand in dense urban areas. The project will allow researchers to “investigate new planning and prediction algorithms in a complex, but controlled, environment,” explains How.
Researchers from MIT and Ford are collaborating on a new project to measure pedestrian traffic and predict the need for on-demand shuttle services, reports Kirsten Korosec for Fortune. The researchers hope to use the data they collect to predict demand for shuttles, and then "routing those vehicles to areas where they’re needed most at the corresponding times.”
Mary Beth Griggs writes for Popular Science that CSAIL researchers have created an algorithm that can predict human interaction. Griggs explains that the algorithm could “lead to artificial intelligence that is better able to react to humans or even security cameras that could alert authorities when people are in need of help.”
Dan Misener writes for CBC News that CSAIL researchers have developed an algorithm that can predict interactions between two people. PhD student Carl Vondrick explains that the algorithm is "learning, for example, that when someone's hand is outstretched, that means a handshake is going to come."
CSAIL researchers have trained a deep-learning program to predict interactions between two people, writes Hope King for CNN. “Ultimately, MIT's research could help develop robots for emergency response, helping the robot assess a person's actions to determine if they are injured or in danger,” King explains.
Ryan Mandelbaum of Popular Science speaks with David Shoemaker, who leads MIT’s LIGO Lab and Advanced LIGO, about the second successful detection of gravitational waves. "It’s wonderful," says Shoemaker. "It’s so different from the first one ... but its importance is no less."
Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz writes that scientists have been able to detect gravitational waves for the second time. “It’s a wondrous thing,” said David Shoemaker, who leads the MIT lab that helped build the detectors. “Three months apart, 1.4 billion years ago, these two events happened at two different places in the sky.”