A new paper by MIT researchers details the results of a survey on an online platform they developed, which asked respondents to make ethical decisions about fictional self-driving car crashes. “Millions of users from 233 countries and territories took the quiz, making 40 million ethical decisions in total,” writes James Vincent of The Verge.
Carolyn Johnson writes for The Washington Post about a new MIT study “that asked people how a self-driving car should respond when faced with a variety of extreme trade-offs.” According to Prof. Iyad Rahwan, “regulating AI will be different from traditional products, because the machines will have autonomy and the ability to adapt,” explains Johnson.
MIT researchers used an online platform known as the “Moral Machine” to gauge how humans respond to ethical decisions made by artificial intelligence, reports Jamie Leventhal for PBS NewsHour. According to postdoc Edmond Awad, two goals of the platform were to foster discussion and “quantitatively [measure] people’s cultural preferences.”
A new book by Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, focuses on Harvey Washington Wiley’s “fight for pure food,” explains Joshua Johnson, host of NPR’s 1A. While food safety has improved, Blum believes “it’s not safe enough and that our safety mechanisms have been – as they were in Wiley’s time – weakened over the years.”
Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, speaks with Radio Boston’s Deborah Becker about her book on Harvey Washington Wiley’s quest to make food safer in America. “I think we have a long way to go in being really transparent about what’s in food,” says Blum about current food safety protections.
A study by MIT researchers demonstrates how air pollution can significantly reduce profits from solar panel installations, reports Avery Thompson for Popular Mechanics. The researchers found that in Delhi, “electricity generation is reduced by more than 10 percent,” Thompson explains, “which translates to a cost of more than $20 million.”
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen argues that having the Securities and Exchange Commission switch to semiannual reporting would not encourage more firms to make long-term investments. Pozen notes that, “a better idea for reforming financial reporting would be for firms to stop issuing ‘guidance’ on their earnings for the next quarter or year.”
Zofia Niemtus writes for The Guardian about tech startups focused on helping breastfeeding mothers. Niemtus notes that MIT’s second “Make The Breast Pump Not Suck!” hackathon, which focused on marginalized groups in society, resulted in projects like “a pop-up shelf for pumping in unsanitary public places; a lactation kit for use in disaster zones; and a virtual reality app.”
Steven Melendez of Fast Company reports on a new system from MIT researchers called Accountability of Unreleased Data for Improved Transparency, or AUDIT, which could help the public track police surveillance. “While certain information may need to stay secret for an investigation to be done properly, some details have to be revealed for accountability to even be possible,” says graduate student Jonathan Frankle.
STAT reporter Orly Nadell Farber writes about a new study by Prof. Amy Finkelstein that challenges the widely held assumption that a large portion of Medicare spending goes towards end-of-life care. “We spend money on sick people — some of them die, some of them recover,” says Finkelstein. “Maybe some recover, in part, because of what we spent on them.”
Writing for The Atlantic, MIT lecturer Amy Carleton describes the focus on public policy, as well as engineering and product design, at this year’s “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” hackathon. “What emerged [at the inaugural hackathon] was an awareness that the challenges surrounding breastfeeding were not just technical and equipment-based,” explains Carleton.
Research led by Prof. Amy Finkelstein found that just 4% of “bankruptcy filings by non-elderly adults” were associated with medical expenses. “Medical bankruptcy…wasn’t nearly as common as anticipated,” writes Alex Kingsbury for The Boston Globe. “Public policy aimed at fighting it might not have the anticipated results, either.”
A study co-authored by researchers at MIT finds that hospitalizations only cause about 4 percent of bankruptcies among nonelderly adults in the U.S., reports Tom Murphy of the Associated Press. Researchers gathered data from “more than a half million adults under 65 in California who had a hospitalization between 2003 and 2007 that wasn't tied to childbirth.”
Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s Vice President for Research, stresses the importance of federal investment in scientific research. “When investments in R & D produce new scientific and technological advances, those advances can in turn spawn new companies and even whole new industries, creating good jobs in a variety of fields,” writes Zuber.
During a broad-ranging conversation with Tom Moroney of Bloomberg News, President L. Rafael Reif discusses why education, the free-flow of talent and federal investment in fundamental scientific research are key components to America's success. Reif explains that, in his view, the foundation of our future is, “talent and believing that our research and investments will benefit the American economy.”