Media Lab

MIT students and community members spoke with 7 News Boston about their experiences viewing Wednesday’s partial solar eclipse, using the Unistellar eVscope Two, a smart telescope provided by the MIT Astrogazers, an outreach group largely made up of MIT graduate students. “To be able to see this celestial event in a way that’s so approachable, and the way that everybody in the community can enjoy it, especially when you have the right gear, is a really special opportunity,” says Joe Diaz, program manager and STEAM educator at the MIT Media Lab. 

Researchers from the Media Lab developed MemPal, a wearable camera that creates a real-time automated text diary of actions and conversations to help older adults locate objects and provide reminders, writes WBUR’s Mike Kalin. “A small study conducted last year by researchers at the MIT Media Lab confirmed improved performance of object finding among users and an overall positive perception of the system. Tools like MemPal could be essential as cases of dementia continue to proliferate,” writes Kalin.  

Prof. Danielle Wood joins Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” to discuss the growing problems posed by space junk, and how space technology helps support our critical infrastructure. “Technology from space helps make life safer on Earth, supports our weather forecasting [and] our daily transportation. All the technology that lets us get deliveries and Uber—that's all coming from space,” says Wood. “We definitely need space to be safe—to keep our lives safe.” 

Graduate students Alfonso Parra Rubio and Erik Strand from the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms worked with the Boston Public Library and the Boston Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture to create a chain-like aluminum sculpture, which will be on display at the library until November, writes Axios’ Steph Solis. “It's a feat of science-driven design and art,” notes Solis.  

Fast Company reporter Jude Cramer spotlights a new study by MIT researchers that finds individuals who rely on AI to verify facts saw a 15% decline in their ability to detect fake news when unassisted by AI. “AIs that ‘tell’ by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, while those that ‘ask’ via Socratic questioning are better at engaging someone to actually learn how to discern the truth on their own,” says graduate student Valdemar Danry. “But it’s very much a trade-off between speed and effort.”

For Fast Company, reporter Max Ufberg features MIT startup Formlabs, a company that has spent over a decade building 3D printers that make professional grade prototyping cheaper and faster. Using the selective laser sintering (SLS) Fuse X1 machine, Ufberg notes that Formlabs will apply their playbook to larger industrial systems. “The goal has always been make it easier to go from an idea to a real thing,” says Formlabs CEO Maxim Lobovsky ‘11. 

Jennifer Eagen of WCVB-TV highlights MIT Space Week, an annual series of events across MIT focused on space exploration and the space industry. Eagan notes that one of the themes for this year’s event is the space economy. "Having humans land on the moon, having built a base on the moon, learning how to operate there so eventually we can go to Mars," said keynote speaker Terry Virts, former commander of the International Space Station. "I would love to see all those things happen that would be a huge success for America and for the world, for all of humanity."

The Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform the world premiere of Prof. Tod Machover’s “already and not yet,” reports A.Z. Madonna for The Boston Globe. Madonna notes that Machover, “has a decades-long resume of experimenting with artificial intelligence technology in music-making, such as in the 1987 science fiction opera ‘VALIS.’” 

Nature reporter Rachel Fieldhouse spotlights graduate student Lauren 'Ren' Ramlan’s work integrating the video game Doom into her research. Ramlan used “Escherichia coli bacteria to display a few frames of Doom,” explains Fieldhouse. “She attached a fluorescent protein to the bacterial cells that could be turned on or off, making them act like black and white pixels on a screen. She then translated and compressed the first few frames of Doom into black-and-white versions that matched the plate growing the cells. Ramlan says the project shows what living things can be engineered to do, and that bacteria are probably not suitable for computing or displaying images.” 

During his time as a visiting artist at the Media Lab, keyboardist Jordan Rudess worked with researchers from the Responsive Environments Group to develop “jam_bot, a machine learning model designed to emulate his playing style and improvise while performing alongside him,” reports Annie Sarlin for The Boston Globe. 

Prof. Danielle Wood speaks with CNBC reporter Laya Neelakandan about NASA’s Artemis III, the United States’ first venture back to the moon in over 50 years, which will carry the first female and first Black astronaut to the Moon. “NASA’s been thinking through this whole process, two decades’ worth, of what we’re going to do is prepare the government to focus on these harder, next-generation missions and be able to do things that are not already demonstrated,” says Wood. 

Prof. Neha Narula speaks with Bloomberg reporters Scarlet Fu and Tim Stenovec about the financial, technological and regulatory risks associated with the rise in GENUIS-compliant stablecoins’ transition to mainstream use. “This is going to apply to more than just stablecoins,” says Narula. “This is going to apply to all tokenized assets. We have to think about the decentralized blockchains behind them. All blockchains are not created equal and right now there’s no indication for how users or stablecoin issuers or other market participants should think about these different blockchains.” 

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn speaks with The Guardian reporter Andrew Gregory about the lack of safety warnings and disclaimers in AI overviews, specifically in AI-generated health materials. “The absence of disclaimers when users are initially served medical information creates several critical dangers,” says Pataranutaporn. “Disclaimers serve as a crucial intervention point. They disrupt this automatic trust and prompt users to engage more critically with the information they receive.”

Graduate student Clarke Cyrus and his colleagues have developed “the Anemoia Device,” a physical machine that “uses a generative AI model to analyze an archival photograph, describe it in a short sentence, and, following the user’s own inputs, convert that description into a unique fragrance,” reports Grace Snelling for Fast Company. “Generative AI usually starts with a blank prompt,” says Clarke. “The dials replace that with a physical, easy-to-understand grammar. You’re not trying to ‘say the right thing’ to an algorithm, it’s more akin to tuning an instrument." 

Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Deb Roy explores the impact of chatbots on language and learning development. “The ordinary forces that tether speech to consequence—social sanction, legal penalty, reputational loss—presuppose a continuous agent whose future can be made worse by what they say,” writes Roy. “With LLMs, there is no such locus. …When the speaker is an LLM, the human stakes that ordinarily anchor speech have nowhere to attach.”