Researchers from MIT and Northwestern have developed an online networking tool aimed at aiding people with anxiety and depression, reports Katie Collins for Wired. The tool, “allows people to build online support communities and practice therapeutic techniques among one another.”
Karen Weintraub writes for The Boston Globe about Professor Temple Grandin’s talk at MIT about coping with stress. Grandin, who has autism, “said her anxiety has been transformed into hyper-vigilance. She’s aware of every little movement the airplane she’s riding on makes, but isn’t worried that the plane might crash,” Weintraub explains.
BBC News reports on the “FingerSynth,” a glove created by graduate student Gershon Dublon “that allows you to hear the sounds of objects through touch.” The device allows the wearer to explore the resonance of different physical objects.
In a TED talk, Prof. Kevin Slavin speaks about the potential dangers surrounding the growing influence of computer algorithms in finance, and the physical environment. “We’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made,” says Slavin.
Liz Stinson writes for Wired about Cord UIs, a project by graduate students Phillip Schoessler and Sang-won Leigh that transforms electrical cables into responsive interfaces that can influence the output of the devices they are attached to. “Cord UIs does accomplish what the Tangible Media Group is all about: Giving invisible data a physical presence,” Stinson explains.
GIFGIF, a project by graduate students Kevin Hu and Travis Rich, maps human emotions by asking people to select which GIFS best represent a specific feeling, reports Jon Christian for Wired. Hu and Rich hope that all of the data collected through GIFGIF “will make it easier to write programs that deal with emotional content.”
Peter Shadbolt of CNN reports that MIT researchers have incorporated social networking into clothing, creating a T-shirt that displays the wearer's interests and associations. "We wanted to examine more tangible ways of representing ourselves in social media," explains graduate student Viirj Kan.
Graduate student Greg Borenstein speaks with BBC News about his efforts to make chess more appealing as a spectator sport. “There’s really something magical about the ability to use computation and statistics to take that drama and that excitement and those brilliant moments and make them visible,” Borenstein explains.
A new study by MIT scientists has found that metadata provides enough information to identify consumers in anonymous data sets. Aviva Rutkin writes for New Scientist that “for 90 per cent of people, just four pieces of information about where they had gone on what day was enough to pick out which card record was theirs.”
In this video, Robert Lee Hotz of The Wall Street Journal discusses how MIT researchers have found that individuals in an anonymous data set can be identified using just a few pieces of information about their shopping habits. “We're really being shadowed by our credit cards,” Lee Hotz explains.
A new MIT study examining anonymous credit card data shows that individuals can be identified using just a few pieces of information, writes Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Lee Hotz. “This touches on the fundamental limit of anonymizing data,” explains Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye.
In a piece for Scientific American, Larry Greenemeier writes about new MIT research showing how easy it is to identify individuals in anonymous data sets. “We have to think harder and reform how we approach data protection and go beyond anonymity, which is very difficult to achieve given the trail of information we all leave digitally,” says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye.
MIT researchers were able to accurately identify individuals in an anonymous data set by looking at the date and location of four credit card transactions, reports Boer Deng for Nature. “Even when researchers only had estimates of time and location of a purchase to within a few days or neighbo[u]rhood blocks, they could still identify cardholders,” explains Deng.
Rebecca Jacobson writes for the PBS NewsHour about how MIT researchers have found that individuals in anonymous data sets can be identified using just a few pieces of outside information. The researchers found that there is a “94 percent chance of tracking all of your purchases with three pieces of extra information.”
Seth Borenstein and Jack Gillum write for the Associated Press about how MIT researchers have found individuals can be identified by examining a few purchases from anonymous credit card data. "We are showing that the privacy we are told that we have isn't real," explains Pentland.