Prof. David Autor speaks with The Economist podcast “Money Talks” about how computers changed the US labor market, the impact of the rise of China and his own experience as an economist. “You have to take your results and accept them and sort of try to understand them,” said Autor. “You can’t simply reject them because they’re not consistent with what your expectations were.”
MIT researchers have a developed a method to make liquid droplets bounce away faster on water-repellant surfaces. “Aside from reducing ice buildup on airplanes, or even the giant sweeping blades of a wind turbine, this research could also benefit waterproof garments, which are a big market for hydrophobic materials,” reports Andrew Liszewski of Gizmodo.
NESN’s Clubhouse visits Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi to explore how a baseball is manufactured. “The best way to understand how a baseball is manufactured is to actually see what’s inside,” Hosoi explains. After cutting the ball in half, Hosoi shows how the ball’s cork center is surrounded by rubber and wool, which is “what gives the baseball its springiness.”
In an article for Bloomberg News, Noah Smith highlights a study by MIT researchers that examines the factors influencing the decline in solar prices. The researchers found that, “from 1980 to 2001, government-funded research and development was the main factor in bringing down costs, but from 2001 to 2012, the biggest factor was economies of scale,” Smith explains.
In this video, graduate student Nima Fazeli speaks with the BBC News about his work developing a robot that uses sensors and cameras to learn how to play Jenga. “It’s using these techniques from AI and machine learning to be able to predict the future of its actions and decide what is the next best move,” explains Fazeli.
CBS This Morning spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new robot that can successfully play Jenga. “It is an automated system that has had a learning period first,” explains Prof. Alberto Rodriguez. “It uses the information from the camera and the force sensor to interpret its interactions with the Jenga tower.”
MIT researchers have developed a robot that can play Jenga. “It "learns" whether to remove a specific block in real time, using visual and tactile feedback, in much the same way as a human player would switch blocks if the tower started to wobble,” reports Jack Guy for CNN.
MIT researchers have developed a robot that can learn how to successfully play Jenga, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “The robot has to learn in the real world, by interacting with the real Jenga tower,” explains Prof. Alberto Rodriguez. “The key challenge is to learn from a relatively small number of experiments by exploiting common sense about objects and physics.”
Gizmodo reporter Andrew Liszewski writes that MIT researchers have developed a robot that can play Jenga using visual and physical cues. The ability to feel “facilitated the robot’s ability to learn how to play all on its own, both in terms of finding a block that was loose enough to remove, and repositioning it on the top of the tower without upsetting the delicate balance.”
MIT researchers have developed a robot that can play Jenga by combining interactive perception and manipulations, reports Mattha Busby for The Guardian. “In what marks significant progress for robotic manipulation of real-world objects, a Jenga-playing machine can learn the complex physics involved in withdrawing wooden blocks from a tower through physical trial and error,” Busby explains.
A new robot developed by MIT researchers uses AI and sensors to play the game of Jenga, reports Rob Verger for Popular Science. “It decides on its own which block to push, [and] which blocks to probe; it decides on its own how to extract them; and it decides on its own when it’s a good idea to keep extracting them, or to move to another one,” says Prof. Alberto Rodriguez.
TechCrunch reporter John Biggs writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system that allows users to reverse-engineer complex items by deconstructing objects and turning them into 3-D models. Biggs writes that the system is a “surprisingly cool way to begin hacking hardware in order to understand it’s shape, volume and stability.”
TechCrunch reporter John Biggs writes that MIT researchers have developed a system for 3-D printing glass that offers users more control over the material and final product. “The system is interesting because it actually produces clear glass structures that can be used for decoration or building,” Biggs notes.
Prof. Daniela Rus and R. David Eldeman, director of the Project on Technology, Economy, and National Security at MIT speak with Matt Simon at Wired about working with robots. “The robots have a fixed architecture and they have a fixed vocabulary,” explains Rus. “So, people will continue to have to learn that and understand what the tool is useful for.”
WGBH reporter Kirk Carapezza spotlights how MIT is providing free training for community college students in the advanced manufacturing field of integrated photonics. "There is a demand for photonics jobs, and it is moving quickly," explains Principal Research Scientist Anuradha Agarwal.