Electrical engineering and computer science (EECS)

CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus Bob Metacalfe ‘69 has been awarded the 2022 Turing Award for his contributions to creating Ethernet, a method for enabling personal computers to communicate directly with one another over a wired connection, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Variants of the original Ethernet connect countless millions of computers around the world,” writes Bray.

Kirin Sinha ‘14 founded Illumix, a technology company that combines 2D models to interactive 3D models to provide immersive AR experiences, reports Rebecca Suhrawardi for Forbes. “Illumix is enabling high-quality and real-time virtual try-on which has implications for the fashion industry ranging from higher conversion rates, fewer returns, and more environmentally-friendly,” says Sinha.

MIT engineers have developed a new technique that enables bug-sized aerial robots to handle a sizeable amount of damage and still fly, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “The new repair techniques could come in handy when using flying robots for search-and-rescue missions in difficult environments like dense forests or collapsed buildings,” writes Paul.

Using an artificial intelligence system, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new Covid-19 vaccine that could be effective against current and future strains, reports Gwen Egan for Boston.com. “The vaccine differs from others currently on the market due to the portion of the virus being targeted,” writes Egan.  

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray writes that MIT researchers have used an AI system to identify a potential new Covid-19 vaccine that may be effective against both current and future variants of the virus. “The new vaccine targets a portion of the COVID virus that is much less prone to evolve,” writes Bray. “That could potentially make it effective against many different versions of the virus, eliminating the need for routine booster shots.”

MIT researchers have developed a new approach to vaccines that uses “a machine learning twist [that] could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots,” reports Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch.

Researchers at MIT have predicted that without improvements in hardware efficiency, energy consumption and emissions from autonomous vehicles could be “comparable to that of data centers today,” reports Sarah Wells for Popular Mechanics. “In order to reduce the future carbon footprint of AVs, scientists will need to make the computing systems of AVs, including smart sensors, far more efficient,” writes Wells. 

Researchers at MIT developed a system that uses artificial intelligence to help predict future risk of developing breast cancer, reports Poppy Harlow for CNN. What this work does “is identifies risk. It can tell a woman that you’re at high risk for developing breast cancer before you develop breast cancer,” says Larry Norton, medical director of the Lauder Breast Center at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Yoky Matsuoka MS ’95, PhD ‘98, founded Yohana, a personal concierge service aimed at helping busy families, reports Kana Inagaki for the Financial Times. The service “matches families with human assistants to help with a wide range of tasks – from online shopping, to sending flowers, or organizing holidays,” writes Inagaki.

MIT engineers have developed an augmented reality headset that uses RFID technology to allow wearers to find objects, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. “The device is intended to assist workers in places like e-commerce warehouses and retail stores to quickly find and identify objects,” writes Tran. “It can also help technicians find tools and items they need to assemble products.” 

An augmented reality headset developed by MIT engineers, called X-AR, uses RFID technology to help users find hidden objects, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “X-AR’s creators were able to guide users with nearly 99 percent accuracy to items scattered throughout a warehouse testing environment,” writes Paul. “When those products were hidden within boxes, the X-AR still even boasted an almost 92 percent accuracy rate.” 

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explore how generative artificial intelligence “presents a philosophical and practical challenge on a scale not experienced since the beginning of the Enlightenment.” Huttenlocher, Kissinger and Schmidt make the case that “parameters for AI’s responsible use need to be established, with variation based on the type of technology and the context of deployment.”

Popular Science reporter Andrew Paul writes that MIT engineers have developed a new chip for smart phones that blocks unwanted signals, which could “greatly reduce production costs, make devices smaller and more efficient, and potentially even improve battery life.” Graduate student Soroush Araei explains that “our research can make your devices work better with fewer dropped calls or poor connections caused by interference from other devices.”

Researchers at MIT have developed a drone that can be controlled using hand gestures, reports Mashable. “I think it’s important to think carefully about how machine learning and robotics can help people to have a higher quality of life and be more productive,” says postdoc Joseph DelPreto. “So we want to combine what robots do well and what people do well so that they can be more effective teams.”

Motherboard reporter Tatyana Woodall writes that a new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that AI models that can learn to perform new tasks from just a few examples create smaller models inside themselves to achieve these new tasks. “Learning is entangled with [existing] knowledge,” graduate student Ekin Akyürek explains. “We show that it is possible for these models to learn from examples on the fly without any parameter update we apply to the model.”