Graduate student Kevin Lu speaks with Heidi Legg of BetaBoston about his work transforming the way that we consume information. “We want to democratize data visualization so that anyone with data can map an image that explains things,” says Hu.
Caroline Fairchild of Fortune speaks with Professor Cynthia Brazeal about women and entrepreneurship. “The world would certainly be a better place if we had more women entrepreneurs,” says Breazeal. “Women are going to bring a different angle to startups.”
Writing for The New York Times, Michael Cooper reports on Prof. Tod Machover’s new work about Detroit, “Symphony in D.” “I look forward to working with Detroiters from all backgrounds to create a collective musical portrait of this exciting moment in the city’s history, when everything is being rethought and anything is possible,” says Machover.
Researchers at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a vision-correcting display that modifies the screens of smartphones or tablets to eliminate a user’s need to wear glasses, writes Rachel Nuwer for Scientific American. “The screen can correct for myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism and more complicated vision problems,” she explains.
Sanjay Salomon writes for Boston.com about the MIT Media Lab’s “You Are Here” project, highlighting the maps researchers have produced exhibiting transportation options for 100 cities. “According to the project’s map of Cambridge, public transportation seems to fall short for most of the city,” writes Salomon.
“[A] team from Harvard and the MIT Media Lab realized that light could be used to restore the appearance of the lost colours without touching the canvas,” reports Jeff Hecht of New Scientist on a new exhibition of Mark Rothko’s murals. The murals were damaged due to over-exposure to sunlight.
Boston Globe reporter Cate McQuiad writes about “Vocal Vibrations,” the musical installation and exhibit featuring works by MIT Professors Tod Machover and Neri Oxman. “I was interested in a space where the music and the environment is very soft. To allow the general public to be directly involved in making music,” explains Machover.
Writing for Smithsonian’s section on the American Ingenuity Award winners, Matthew Shaer examines Professor Hugh Herr’s work developing bionic limbs. “To spend any time with Hugh Herr is to understand that he is already thinking beyond a world where bionics are used only to enable wounded people and toward a future where bionics are an integral part of everyday life.”
“Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have invented a glass screen that corrects bad vision, without the need for spectacles or contact lenses,” the BBC News reports. “The device is compatible with phones, tablets, TVs and even car dashboards.”
Kevin Gray reports for Wired on CityFARM, a project out of the MIT Media Lab focused on developing sustainable urban agriculture. "I believe there's the possibility that we can change the world and change the food system,” says CityFARM founder Caleb Harper.
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston writes about the ‘Descience’ fashion show held at the MIT Media Lab. The science-themed fashion show brought together researchers and designers to create garments that reflected each group’s line of study.
Colleen Shalby reports for the PBS NewsHour that MIT is launching a new laboratory to examine how people use social media, in particular Twitter. Twitter is granting MIT researchers access to every tweet sent in the social network’s history as part of this new project.
WBUR reporter Zeninjor Enwemeka writes about the new MIT laboratory launched this week to analyze social media. “The new lab will focus on understanding how people behave across various types of media, and develop tools to make sense of social patterns,” writes Enwemeka.
Andrea Chang of The Los Angeles Times writes about a new partnership between Twitter and MIT to study social media patterns. Twitter is providing the MIT Media Lab with $10 million to study and make sense of content across social and mass-media platforms.
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Twitter are teaming up on a $10 million project to better understand social networks and figure out new ways to benefit from them,” reports the Associated Press. The partnership will allow MIT access to Twitter’s archive, as well as real-time monitoring of new tweets.