Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs)

“Brief Tender Light,” a documentary by Arthur Musah '04, MEng '05, spotlights four African-born MIT students and their experiences with adapting to the culture and challenges in and out of the classroom, reports Celina Colby for The Bay State Banner. “The story of international students, or specifically African students, in the U.S. hadn’t really been told,” says Musah. “Stats that I’ve learned more recently say there are about a million international students in any given year studying in the U.S., of which about 40,000 are African. That seems like a substantial portion of the fabric of American society.”

Arthur Musah '04, MEng '05 and graduate student Philip Abel Adama speak with WBUR host Tiziana Dearing about Musah’s documentary, “Brief Tender Light,” which follows the lives of four African-born MIT students, who “were driven to study in the U.S. and create change at home.” Musah explains, “I made this film because I felt having gone through the experience of studying in the U.S. and gone through a transformative experience, I felt that there were questions that were unanswered that I didn’t know I would have after the experience and so it was a way to go back and answer those questions or look for answers.” 

Graduate student Sarah Gurev and her colleagues have developed a new AI system named EVEscape that can, “predict alterations likely to occur to viruses as they evolve,” reports Erin Prater for Fortune. Gurev says that with the amount of data the system has amassed, it “can make surprisingly accurate predications.”

Arvid Lunnemark '22, Michael Truell '22, Sualeh Asif '22, and Aman Sanger '22 co-founded Anysphere, a startup building an “‘AI-native’” software development environment, called Cursor,” reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “In the next several years, our mission is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, more fun and creative,” says Truell. “Our platform enables all developers to build software faster.”

Curtis Northcutt SM '17, PhD '21, Jonas Mueller PhD '18, and Anish Athalye SB '17, SM '17, PhD '23 have co-founded Cleanlab, a startup aimed at fixing data problems in AI models, reports Alex Konrad for Forbes. “The reality is that every single solution that’s data-driven — and the world has never been more data-driven — is going to be affected by the quality of the data,” says Northcutt.

Peter Mui ’82 founded FixIt Clinic, a nonprofit which hosts “community events where volunteer fixers are matched with those in need of a repair,” reports Veronique Greenwood for The Boston Globe. “To Mui, now a hardware and software engineer in Berkeley, Calif., throwaway culture encourages a devaluing of our own lives,” writes Greenwood. “It took hours to earn the money to buy something. If someone fails to even look for a repair, how little must that time mean, in the end?”

Prof. James Fujimoto, research affiliate Eric Swanson SM ’84 and David Huang PhD ’93 have been honored with the Lasker Award for their work for their work inventing “imaging technology that revolutionized how ophthalmologists diagnose diseases of the eye," reports Jonathan Saltzman for The Boston Globe. The scientists were recognized for developing “optical coherence tomography, or OCT, the first technology that enabled doctors to see a two- and three-dimensional cross-sectional image of the retina,” Saltzman explains. “This painless scan takes less than 10 minutes, and is now the standard of care for diagnosing retina diseases.”

Arthur Musah '04, MEng '05 speaks with Boston Globe reporter Kajsa Kedefors about his new documentary, “Brief Tender Light,” which follows the lives of several African-born students from their first year at MIT through graduation and to their first jobs. Musah, “weaves in his own reflections in voice-overs throughout the film, exploring what it means to be an international African student at an elite American institution,” explains Kedefors. “He speaks to the pressure the students in the film share from back home: the idea that education is valuable and rare — that they should bring back what they learned to better the community.”

A new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how “machine-learning systems designed to spot someone breaking a policy rule—a dress code, for example—will be harsher or more lenient depending on minuscule-seeming differences in how humans annotated data that were used to train the system,” reports Ananya for Scientific American. “This is an important warning for a field where datasets are often used without close examination of labeling practices, and [it] underscores the need for caution in automated decision systems—particularly in contexts where compliance with societal rules is essential,” says Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi.

Popular Science reporter Andrew Paul writes that MIT researchers have developed a new long-range, low-power underwater communication system. Installing underwater communication networks “could help continuously measure a variety of oceanic datasets such as pressure, CO2, and temperature to refine climate change modeling,” writes Paul, “as well as analyze the efficacy of certain carbon capture technologies.”

Prof. Regina Barzilay writes for CNN about how AI can impact health care. “Smart AI algorithms, which are trained on large-scale medical data and equipped with powerful computing, can go beyond what is humanly possible, eliminate care delays and reduce the cost of health care,” writes Barzilay.

Forbes reporter Rob Toews spotlights Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, and research affiliate Ramin Hasani and their work with liquid neural networks. “The ‘liquid’ in the name refers to the fact that the model’s weights are probabilistic rather than constant, allowing them to vary fluidly depending on the inputs the model is exposed to,” writes Toews.

Venti Technologies, which was co-founded by MIT researchers and alumni, is working to build autonomous vehicles for industrial and global supply chain hubs, reports Bruce Rogers for Forbes. “Working with the world's leading port operator provides Venti the opportunity to bring the economics of autonomous vehicles to over 60 ports globally,” writes Rogers. “These ports operate 24/7 requiring 2-3 shifts of human drivers.”

Nature contributor David Chandler writes about the late Prof. Edward Fredkin and his impact on computer science and physics. “Fredkin took things even further, concluding that the whole Universe could actually be seen as a kind of computer,” explains Chandler. “In his view, it was a ‘cellular automaton’: a collection of computational bits, or cells, that can flip states according to a defined set of rules determined by the states of the cells around them. Over time, these simple rules can give rise to all the complexities of the cosmos — even life.”

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Boston Globe reporter Aruni Soni about her new study that finds reducing the cost of solar energy will be accelerated by improvements in soft tech. “We found that the soft technology involved in solar energy really has not changed and hasn’t improved nearly as quickly as the hardware,” says Trancik. “These soft costs, in many systems, can be 50 percent or even more of the total cost of solar electricity.”