CNN reporter Peter Valdes-Dapena writes that MIT researchers are working with Lamborghini to develop a battery-free, electric supercar. Valdes-Dapena explains that instead of running on batteries, the body of the car, which would be made from exotic carbon nanotubes, would be used as a supercapacitor.
Graduate student Anish Athalye speaks with the BBC about his work examining how image recognitions systems can be fooled. "More and more real-world systems are starting to incorporate neural networks, and it's a big concern that these systems may be possible to subvert or attack using adversarial examples,” Athalye explains.
New Scientist reporter Abigail Beale writes that MIT researchers have been able to trick an AI system into thinking an image of a turtle is a rifle. Beale writes that the results, “raise concerns about the accuracy of face recognition systems and the safety of driverless cars, for example.”
In an article published by The Wall Street Journal about the future of programmable materials, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith highlight Prof. Daniela Rus’ work developing “origami bots that can shape themselves into tools to perform medical procedures or deliver drugs inside the body.”
Guardian reporter Alex Hern writes that in a new paper MIT researchers demonstrated the concept of adversarial images, describing how they tricked an AI system into thinking an image of a turtle was an image of a gun. The researchers explained that their work “demonstrates that adversarial examples are a significantly larger problem in real world systems than previously thought.”
Valentina Zarya writes for Fortune that MIT researchers have developed an AI system that can generate horror stories. The system, named Shelley, learned its craft by reading a Reddit forum containing stories from amateur horror writers. The bot, Shelley, also tweets a line for a new story every hour, encouraging Twitter users to continue the story.
Writing for HuffPost, Prof. Georgia Perakis explains that it is possible to detect customer trends without using data gathered via social media. By using data like store locations, customer demographics, and timing of purchases, “we can still understand the influence of certain individuals and groups,” Perakis explains.
MIT Media Lab researchers have created an AI program that can write horror stories in collaboration with humans via Twitter, reports David Wade for CBS Boston. “Over time, we are expecting her to learn more from the crowd, and to create even more scarier stories,” says postdoctoral associate Pinar Yanardag.
In a WBUR segment about how technology is increasingly being used to assist seniors and caregivers, Rachel Zimmerman highlights Rendever, an MIT spinout, and speaks with Prof. Paul Osterman, Prof. Dina Katabi and Dr. Joseph Coughlin about their work. Zimmerman explains that Coughlin believes “a mix of smart devices and other personal services,” will help people age well.
Nick Glass of CNN writes about the history of death masks and a new wave of masks developed by Prof. Neri Oxman, which were digitally designed without a human model. “The masks are mesmerizingly beautiful and translucent, filled with smoky whirls of color -- reds, oranges, greens and purples. They seem to evoke many things,” says Glass.
A paper from MIT researchers suggests that small towns will be more negatively impacted by automation than larger cities, writes Ari Gaskell for HuffPost. The researchers found that, “automation is more likely in roles with repetitive tasks playing a major part, and such lower skilled roles tend to be concentrated more in smaller towns than larger cities.”
MIT researchers have developed an artificial neural network that can generate horror stories by collaborating with people on Twitter, HuffPost reports. Pinar Yanardag, a postdoc at the Media Lab, explains that the system is, “creating really interesting and weird stories that have never really existed in the horror genre.”
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that an international team of astronomers, including MIT Prof. Saul Rappaport, has detected comets outside the Milky Way. “The distant ice balls, roughly the size of Halley's Comet, were spotted orbiting a small star 800 light-years from Earth. They were documented using transit photometry,” Hays explains.
MIT scientists have developed a technique that could potentially be used one day to treat diseases of the brain, muscles, liver and kidneys by using CRISPR to edit RNA, writes Melissa Healy for The Los Angeles Times. Making edits to the chemical message of RNA, “doesn’t effect a permanent change in a cell’s architectural plan; rather, it essentially alters the implementation of that plan,” explains Healy.
Newsweek reporter Joseph Frankel writes that MIT Media Lab researchers have developed an AI system named Shelley that uses human input to write short horror stories. Frankel explains that Shelley, “tweets out one or two sentences as the start of a new horror story, then calls for users to respond with their own lines.”