Quartz reporter Jenny Anderson highlights Prof. Mitchel Resnick’s ideas for how to apply the kindergarten approach to learning to our entire educational system, in an effort to inspire lifelong learning. Anderson explains that Mitchel believes, “Kids should actively work on projects, which intersect with something they are passionate about, while working with peers in a playful environment.”
STAT reporter Casey Ross writes about how MIT researchers have developed a new ingestible Prof. Timothy Lu explains that he hopes that the sensor “opens up a really new window into how the gut and the rest of the body are connected, and hopefully provide new diagnostic strategies as well.”
Associated Press reporter Tali Arbel writes that MIT researchers have found that Amazon’s facial detection technology often misidentifies women and women with darker skin. Arbel writes that the study, “warns of the potential of abuse and threats to privacy and civil liberties from facial-detection technology.”
A new study by Media Lab researchers finds that Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition system performed more accurately when identifying lighter-skinned faces, reports Drew Harrell for The Washington Post. The system “performed flawlessly in predicting the gender of lighter-skinned men,” writes Harrell, “but misidentified the gender of darker-skinned women in roughly 30 percent of their tests.”
Verge reporter James Vincent writes that Media Lab researchers have found that the facial recognition system Rekognition performed worse at identifying an individual’s gender if they were female or dark-skinned. In experiments, the researchers found that the system “mistook women for men 19 percent of the time and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time,” Vincent explains.
MIT researchers have found that the Rekognition facial recognition system has more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces than similar services, reports Natasha Singer for The New York Times. Graduate student Joy Buolamwini said “the results of her studies raised fundamental questions for society about whether facial technology should not be used in certain situations,” writes Singer.
New Yorker contributor Caroline Lester writes about the Moral Machine, an online platform developed by MIT researchers to crowdsource public opinion on the ethical issues posed by autonomous vehicles.
Popular Mechanics reporter David Grossman writes that MIT researchers have developed a new imaging technique that allows entire neural circuits in the brain to be explored at speeds 1,000 times faster than currently available methods. The new technique could allow scientists to “spot where brain diseases originate or even the basics of how behavior works.”
MIT researchers have developed a new high-resolution technique to image the brain that could be used to create more precise maps of the brain and identify the causes of brain disease, reports Megan Thielking for STAT. “If we can figure out exactly where diseases begin,” explains Prof. Edward Boyden, “that could be pretty powerful.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, members of the Media Lab’s Scalable Cooperation research group argue that independent oversight is needed to ensure that new AI technologies are developed in an ethical manner. “AI is the new framework of our lives,” they write. “We need to ensure it’s a safe, human-positive framework, from top to bottom.”
Prof. Pattie Maes writes for Wired about how wearable medical technology is becoming an increasingly mainstream component of therapeutic intervention. “While we need to be careful to make sure these designs safeguard privacy, give complete control to the user and avoid dependency whenever possible,” writes Maes, “there are countless possibilities for digital, wearable technologies to supplement and even replace traditional drugs and therapy.”
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.
Former postdoctoral associate Pinar Yanardag speaks with STAT reporter Elizabeth Preston about her work developing an immersive virtual reality app that aims to make it easier to pump breast milk. With virtual reality, “you can basically teleport yourself into a nice baby nursery,” says Yanardag. “You don’t need to see this environment, see all these pumps and wires and everything.”
Boston Globe reporter Martin Finucane writes that MIT researchers have developed a new way to fabricate tiny objects. “The researchers are currently able to create objects that are around 1 cubic millimeter, with features as small as 50 nanometers,” Finucane explains. “The tiny structures could be useful in fields from optics to medicine to robotics.”
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can shrink objects to the nanoscale using a laser, reports Lauren Kent for CNN. Kent explains that the technology “could be applied to anything from developing smaller microscope and cell phone lenses to creating tiny robots that improve everyday life.”