Using data compiled by the Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines concerning Twitter conversation before and after the mass shooting in Orlando, Aaron Blake of The Washington Post shows that political priorities leading up to the presidential election “may depend heavily on world and domestic events that nobody can predict.”
Andrea Shea reports for WBUR that researchers from the MIT Media Lab and the Berklee College of Music have started a new initiative aimed at tackling ownership, licensing and distribution rights within the music industry. Shea explains that the initiative is focused on “laying the groundwork for a shared, open database of ownership rights.”
Prof. Hugh Herr has been named the recipient of Spain’s 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, according to the AP. Herr’s achievements “have had a major impact on people with disabilities, through adaptive knee prostheses for femoral amputees, and ankle-and-foot orthopedic prostheses for those with clubfoot or disabilities caused by cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis.”
Researchers in MIT’s Tangible Media Group have developed visual cues to help people learn how to play the piano, reports G. Clay Whittaker for Popular Science. “Animated figures walk, dance, and lumber across the keyboard in telling motions that help you learn not just which keys to strike, but how hard and for what duration to strike them.”
Popular Science reporter G. Clay Whittaker writes that MIT researchers have developed a new interface that mimics the properties of other materials. Whittaker writes that the project “goes a step past responsive design. Your interactions with the surface changes based on what you've programmed it to replicate: water, rubber, a mattress.”
Wired reporter Liz Stinson writes about the MIT Tangible Media Group’s new shapeshifting interface that can mimic the characteristics of a wide variety of materials. The interface “hints at how materiality could be used to build a tangible bridge between our digital and physical interfaces,” writes Stinson.
Professors Edward Boyden and Max Tegmark are honored as “Game Changers” in a Boston Globe special section dedicated to highlighting people and organizations for their work. The Globe features Boyden’s work developing tools to better understand the brain, and Tegmark’s involvement in the Future of Life Institute.
Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, speaks with Vanessa Quirk of Metropolis about MIT’s widespread presence at the 2016 Venice Biennale, the Institute’s approach to architectural challenges and its interdisciplinary ethos. “MIT thrives on what it calls complex societal problems,” says Sarkis. “And what better complex societal problems are there today than cities and architecture and the environment.”
Bloomberg West broadcasts live from the MIT campus in a special segment highlighting cutting-edge research underway across campus and MIT’s role in driving innovation. “In general, technology can help people,” says Prof. John Leonard. “That’s one of the things I believe as an MIT professor is that technology can make the world a better place.”
In an article for Scientific American, Prof. César Hidalgo examines how to improve the design of and make open data websites more usable. “To make open data really open, we need to make it searchable, and for that we need to bring data to the surface of the web,” writes Hidalgo.
ELLE reporter Chloe Schama speaks with the organizers of the MIT breast pump hackathon about the need for a better breast pump. "There are a lot of women who are internalizing failures," says Alexis Hope, one of the organizers of the MIT hackathon, "when these are really problems with public policy or with pumps."
In an article for The Boston Globe, Jeremy Eichler highlights MIT’s open house on Saturday April 23rd as part of his top picks for Boston-area classical music events. Eichler writes that, “researchers from the MIT Media Lab — incubator of operatic robots, city symphonies, and many other arts-related projects — will offer demos of their current research.”
In an article for the BBC News, Jane Wakefield highlights a gesture-controlled transforming unit designed for small homes by MIT researchers. "We need to think of technology-enabled furniture as a platform for integrating other technology because in a small apartment it is not practical to put in conventional systems," explains Principal Research Scientist Kent Larson.
BetaBoston reporter Amanda Burke writes that three MIT student inventors have been named winners of the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. Burke writes that the MIT students were honored for creating, “a camera that is sharper than the human eye, an electric car transmission, and a fully automatic health-food restaurant.”
Anthony Cuthbertson writes for Newsweek that MIT researchers have developed a drone that is capable of mimicking a person’s drawings. Cutherbertson explains that, “the drone has been modified to carry a pen, allowing it to copy the actions of a human hand and scale it up through a combination of mechanical and algorithmic methods.”