Prof. Carlo Ratti co-authors an article for The Boston Globe that examines the “power and pitfalls of condensing cities into small, specialized utopias,” like Barbie Land and Los Alamos. “To see diversity at work, we need look no further than Barbenheimer itself,” they write. “This accidental double feature turned our empty movie theaters into pop-up cities, tiny but diverse, with two tentpole films like adjacent storefronts on the street.”
Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with Freakonomics guest host Adam Davidson about his new book, economic history, and why new technologies impact people differently. “What do people creating technology, deploying technology— what exactly are they seeking to achieve? If they’re seeking to replace people, then that’s what they’re going to be doing,” says Johnson. “But if they’re seeking to make people individually more productive, more creative, enable them to design and carry out new tasks — let’s push the vision more in that direction. And that’s a naturally more inclusive version of the market economy. And I think we will get better outcomes for more people.”
Prof. Jacopo Buongiorno speaks with NBC reporter Catherine Clifford about the future of nuclear energy in the United States. “The US may catch up if the new technologies being developed here — small modular reactors and microreactors above all — will prove to be technically and commercially successful, which is currently uncertain,” says Buongiorno.
Prof. Jinhua Zhao writes for Boston Magazine about how artificial intelligence could help improve the MBTA system. “When something significant happens on public transportation—the line is down, the road is congested, some bridge is blocked—the customer is suddenly stuck in the system and needs more help,” writes Zhao. “For when that happens, we developed a solution to send individualized guidance for a better transit option to that person, communicated by text message or an app.”
Prof. Yoon Kim speaks with Popular Science reporter Charlotte Hu about how large language models like ChatGPT operate. “You can think of [chatbots] as algorithms with little knobs on them,” says Kim. “These knobs basically learn on data that you see out in the wild,” allowing the software to create “probabilities over the entire English vocab.”
Prof. Scott Stern co-leads the Place-Based Innovation Policy Study Group – “a group of academics, practitioners and NSF staff that aims to deploy ‘timely insight for the NSF Regional Innovation Engines program,’” reports Nature. Stern and his colleagues are “providing an assessment of the ‘state of knowledge’ of place-based innovation ecosystems and their relationship to geographical and socio-economic inclusion,” writes Nature.
Writing for The Hill, Andre Zollinger, senior policy manager at J-PAL Global, makes the case that “current attention to air pollution can be transformational for how we tackle climate change. Policy leaders in the U.S. and abroad should seize this moment of reckoning over our common struggle for clean air as an opportunity to focus on policies that are known to curb air pollution and simultaneously combat climate change.”
Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan speaks with Sarah Gonzalez of NPR’s Planet Money about why European workers tend to be allotted more vacation time than workers in the U.S. Kochan notes that “if given the option, workers are historically more interested in seeing their take-home pay increase than they are in getting another day or week of vacation,” particularly when they have to cover the costs of health insurance.
Nature reporter Andrew Robinson spotlights “Atlas of the Senseable City” a new book co-authored by Prof. Carlo Ratti. The book is a “highly illustrated collection of digital maps,” Robinson notes, adding that it “analyzes four essential urban dimensions: motion, connection, circulation and experience.”
Prof. D. Fox Harrell writes for The Guardian about the importance of ensuring AI systems are designed to “reflect the ethically positive culture we truly want.” Harrell emphasizes that: “We need to be aware of, and thoughtfully design, the cultural values that AI is based on. With care, we can build systems based on multiple worldviews – and address key ethical issues in design such as transparency and intelligibility."
Ivan Sutherland PhD ’63, whose work “laid some of the foundations of the digital world that surrounds us today,” speaks with Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner about the importance of fun and play in advancing technological research. “You’re no good at things you think aren’t fun,” Sutherland said. If you want to expand the scope of what’s possible today, he noted, “you need to play around with stuff to understand what it will do, and what it won’t do.”
Prof. Amy Finkelstein speaks with Politico reporters Erin Schumaker, Daniel Payne and Evan Peng about her new book “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” “Health insurance is not delivering on its function,” says Finkelstein. “Over 1 in 10 Americans under 65 are uninsured at any given moment, and of the 30 million Americans who are uninsured, 6 in 10 are eligible for free or heavily discounted health insurance coverage. And yet they don’t have that coverage.”
This past spring, Prof. J. Phillip Thompson and MIT lecturer Elisabeth Reynolds taught a class at MIT that sent students to work with local officials across the country to help identify available federal funds for climate change mitigation, reports Farah Stockman for The New York Times. “We have to figure out how to use it. Because if we don’t, wealthy communities will go green, and low-income communities will stay brown,” says Thompson. “Unless we do something intentionally to make sure that it is fair, it will bypass poor communities.”
Prof. Adam Berinsky speaks with "Our Body Politic" host Farai Chideya about his new book “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight it.” Berinksky explains that the, "mere questioning of political reality can have serious downstream consequences because sowing doubt about political policies and claims is much easier than resolving such doubt,” says Berinsky.
Fortune reporter John Singer spotlights Prof. Amy Finkelstein’s new book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” The book details “an approach that could potentially transform the multi-dimensional dysfunctionality that is the U.S. healthcare system,” writes Singer.