Download RSS feed: News Articles / In the Media
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with NPR host Kate Wells about a decision by the National Eating Disorders Associations to replace their helpline with a chatbot. “I think it's very alienating to have an interactive system present you with irrelevant or what can feel like tangential information,” says Ghassemi.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and others are working to build SPARC, a prototype device that aims to extract net energy from plasma and generate fusion power, reports Philip Ball for Scientific American. “SPARC will be a midsize tokamak in which the plasma is tightly confined by very intense magnetic fields produced by new high-temperature superconducting magnets developed at MIT and unveiled in 2021.”
MIT alumni Steve Fredette, Aman Narang and Jonathan Grimm co-founded Toast, an all-in-one online restaurant management software company, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “The Toast founders spent hours talking to restaurateurs and built features such as real-time communication with the kitchen about special orders and dishes that have sold out, and a way of tracking loyalty rewards,” explains Pressman.
Prof. Jongyoon Han and research scientist Junghyo Yoon have developed a new portable desalination device that can deliver safe drinking water at the push of a button, reports Meghan Gunn and Kerri Anne Renzulli for Newsweek. The device “requires less power than a cell phone charger to run and produces clean drinking water that exceeds World Health Organization standards,” writes Gunn and Renzulli.
Soledad O’Brien spotlights how researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital developed a new artificial intelligence tool, called Sybil, that an accurately predict a patient’s risk of developing lung cancer. “Sybil predicted with 86 to 94 percent accuracy whether a patient would develop lung cancer within a year,” says O’Brien.
MIT researchers have developed SoftZoo, “an open framework platform that simulated a variety of 3D model animals performing specific tasks in multiple environmental settings,” reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “This computational approach to co-designing the soft robot bodies and their brains (that is, their controllers) opens the door to rapidly creating customized machines that are designed for a specific task,” says CSAIL director, Prof. Daniela Rus.
Researchers at MIT have developed “SoftZoo,” a platform designed to “study the physics, look and locomotion and other aspects of different soft robot models,” reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “Dragonflies can perform very agile maneuvers that other flying creatures cannot complete because they have special structures on their wings that change their center of mass when they fly,” says graduate student Tsun-Hsuan Wang. “Our platform optimizes locomotion the same way a dragonfly is naturally more adept at working through its surroundings.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with NPR host Emily Kwong and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel about how artificial intelligence could impact medicine. “When you take state-of-the-art machine-learning methods and systems and then evaluate them on different patient groups, they do not perform equally,” says Ghassemi.
Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech company founded by Jason Kelly BS ’03, PhD ’08, Reshma Shetty PhD ‘08, Barry Canton PhD ’08, Austin Che PhD ’08 and Professor Tom Knight, is working to develop synthetic fragrances, reports Scott Kirsner for The Boston Globe.
Researchers at MIT have developed a new nanoparticle sensor that can detect cancerous proteins through a simple urine test. “The researchers designed the tests to be done on a strip of paper, similar to the at-home COVID tests everyone became familiar with during the pandemic,” writes Lambert. “They hope to make it as affordable and accessible to as many patients as possible.”
Researchers from the Future of Data Initiative at MIT have published a white paper examining “how to design more accountable and traceable financial data systems,” reports Ben Schreckinger for Politico. Senior research scientist Daniel Weitzner says information accountability “means that uses of personal data should be visible to data subjects. And that the companies or government who use personal data should be accountable for misuse.”
Popular Science reporter Jamie Dickman writes that using liquid neural networks, MIT researchers have “trained a drone to identify and navigate toward objects in varying environments.” Dickman notes that: “These robust networks enable the drone to adapt in real-time, even after initial training, allowing it to identify a target object despite changes in their environment.”
Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of autonomous drone that uses advanced neural networks to fly, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. “The new design allows the drone to make better decisions when flying through completely new environments,” writes Tran, “and could have future applications in self-driving cars, search and rescue operations, wildlife monitoring, or even diagnosing medical issues.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with WBUR reporter Geoff Brumfiel about her research studying the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare. “When you take state-of-the-art machine learning methods and systems and then evaluate them on different patient groups, they do not perform equally,” says Ghassemi.
Researchers at MIT have created a four-legged robot called DribbleBot, reports Caroline Goggin for WHDH. The robot “can dribble a soccer ball under the same conditions as humans, using onboard sensors to travel across different types of terrain.”