Smithsonian reporter Emily Matchar spotlights AlterEgo, a device developed by MIT researchers to help people with speech pathologies communicate. “A lot of people with all sorts of speech pathologies are deprived of the ability to communicate with other people,” says graduate student Arnav Kapur. “This could restore the ability to speak for people who can’t.”
WGBH reporter Cristina Quinn visits MIT to learn about a new ethics of AI workshop offered to middle school-aged children this summer. “I don't want the ethics piece to go to an elite few,” says graduate research assistant Blakeley H. Payne of the importance of offering an education in AI ethics. “And then you're just perpetuating these systems of inequality over and over again.”
Prof. Ed Boyden speaks with New Scientist reporter Clare Wilson about his work studying the inner workings of the human brain. “I have a deep desire to understand what it means to be human – the meaning of our thoughts and feelings,” says Boyden. “That is really what motivates me to get out of bed in the morning.”
Writing for The New York Times, research scientists Chelsea Barabas and Karthik Dinakar argue that risk assessment algorithms designed to help predict people’s future criminal behavior are “fundamentally flawed. They give judges recommendations that make future violence seem more predictable and more certain than it actually is. In the process, risk assessments may perpetuate the misconceptions and fears that drive mass incarceration.”
Wired reporter Elizabeth notes how the ScratchJr programming language, which was developed to help teach children how to code, is being used as part of an effort to teach young children the basics of computer programming.
Reporting for NBC Mach, Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky writes that MIT researchers are developing augmented plants that can serve as sensors. Jeffrey-Wilensky explains that the researchers believe the plants could one day be used to “guard our homes, connect us to distant friends and send us gentle push notifications without the sensory overload of a computer screen.”
Popular Mechanics reporter Dave Grossman writes that MIT researchers are “utilizing plants' natural abilities of sensory detection and attempting to co-join them with modern tech.”
Daily Beast reporter David Axe spotlights graduate student Guillermo Bernal’s work developing virtual reality avatars that can convey realistic human emotions. “As this medium moves forward, this and other tools are what will help the field of virtual reality expand from a medium of surface-level experience to one of deep, emotionally compelling human-to-human connection,” Bernal explains.
Motherboard reporter Rob Dozier writes about Glitch, an MIT startup that uses machine learning to design clothing. “These tools are meant to empower human designers,” explains graduate student Emily Salvador. “What I think is really cool about these creative-focused AI tools is that there’s still this really compelling need for a human to intervene with the algorithm.”
Forbes reporter Joe McKendrick highlights a Nature review article by MIT researchers that calls for expanding the study of AI. “We’re seeing the rise of machines with agency, machines that are actors making decisions and taking actions autonomously," they write. "This calls for a new field of scientific study that looks at them not solely as products of engineering and computer science.”
In an article for Wired, Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, argues that rules and regulations must be established to ensure the responsible exploration of space. “As space becomes more commercial and pedestrian like the internet, we must not allow the cosmos to become a commercial and government free-for-all with disregard for the commons and shared values,” writes Ito.
Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, writes for Wired about the decision to grant Amazon the .amazon domain and how the International Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN) evaluates such decisions. “The job of ICANN is to govern the name space in an open and inclusive process and to steward this process in the best, but never perfect, way possible,” writes Ito.
Smithsonian reporter Rachael Lallensack spotlights how MIT alumnus Anirudh Sharma developed a commercial ink from air pollution. Sharma explains that he hopes the ink, which is now on display at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, inspires others “to start looking at new forms of waste that are lying outside, unutilized.”
In an article for Gizmodo, Dell Cameron writes that graduate student Joy Buolamwini testified before Congress about the inherent biases of facial recognition systems. Buolamwini’s research on face recognition tools “identified a 35-percent error rate for photos of darker skinned women, as opposed to database searches using photos of white men, which proved accurate 99 percent of the time.”
Wired reporter Lily Hay Newman highlights graduate student Joy Buolamwini’s Congressional testimony about the bias of facial recognition systems. “New research is showing bias in the use of facial analysis technology for health care purposes, and facial recognition is being sold to schools,” said Buolamwini. “Our faces may well be the final frontier of privacy.”