Cipher News editor Amy Harder spotlights the MIT Renewable Energy Clinic, a new course developed by Prof. Larry Susskind aimed at training students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Harder notes that the course is focused on creating “collaboration that may slow down projects initially by incorporating more input but ultimately speed them up by avoiding later-stage conflicts.”
MIT researchers have developed a new programmable, shape-changing smart fiber called FibeRobo that can change its structure in response to hot or cold temperatures, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “FibeRobo is flexible and strong enough to use within traditional manufacturing methods like embroidery, weaving looms, and knitting machines,” writes Paul. “With an additional ability to combine with electrically conductive threads, a wearer could directly control their FibeRobo clothing or medical wearables like compression garments via wireless inputs from a controller or smartphone.”
MIT researchers have designed a wearable ultrasound device that could help make breast cancer screening more accessible, reports Carrie Arnold for National Geographic. “Early detection is the key for survival,” says Prof. Canan Dagdeviren. “Our humble calculation shows that this technology has the potential to save 12 million lives per year globally.”
Joy Buolamwini PhD '22 writes for The Boston Globe about her experience uncovering bias in artificial intelligence through her academic and professional career. “I critique AI from a place of having been enamored with its promise, as an engineer more eager to work with machines than with people at times, as an aspiring academic turned into an accidental advocate, and also as an artist awakened to the power of the personal when addressing the seemingly technical,” writes Buolamwini. “The option to say no, the option to halt a project, the option to admit to the creation of dangerous and harmful though well-intentioned tools must always be on the table.”
DUSP Lecturer Bruno Verdini PhD ’15 speaks with Jenn Williams of Foreign Policy’s “The Negotiators” podcast to discuss the 2012 Colorado River agreement between the United States and Mexico, and his book, “Winning Together: The Natural Resource Negotiation Playbook.” “If you are recognizing that the feedback loops in natural resource negotiations are going to be complex and unexpected as time goes by, you only have an ability to monitor, be flexible, and address new challenges if you’ve created a mechanism of trust, and in that mechanism implementation follows, even across different political perspectives,” says Verdini. “Because it is in your interest to keep complying.”
Roofscapes Studio, an MIT startup co-founded by Olivier Faber MArch ’23, Tim Cousin MArch ’23 and Eytan Levi MArch/MSRED ’21, transforms rooftops into greenspaces as part of an effort to combat climate change and provide green spaces in cities, reports Kim Willsher for The Guardian. The team is looking to add, “wooden platforms fixed across the sloping panes to create roof gardens, terraces and even walkways,” in Paris to help prevent the city from overheating.
Prof. John Fernández, director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative, speaks with Aynsley O’Neill and Jenni Doering of NPR’s Living on Earth about steps homeowners and renters can take to reduce the risk of wildfires impacting their homes. “The most important thing is to reduce the fuel that’s available between your house and the beginning of the forest, reducing the amount of objects that could ignite,” says Fernández. “That includes outdoor furniture [or] any plastic material.”
In an article for Bloomberg, Prof. Carlo Ratti and Michael Baick, a staff writer at CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, highlight the importance of communication within cities. “The world has an incredible stockpile of effective urban policies, but the best ideas are not being adopted quickly or widely enough,” write Ratti and Baick. “Covid-19 taught us all how to slow the spread of viruses: wear masks, avoid large gatherings and take vaccines. To speed the spread of good ideas, we need to take the opposite tack by making urban solutions go viral.”
Researchers at MIT have designed “a wearable ultrasound scanner that could be used at home to detect breast tumors earlier,” reports Simon Makin for Scientific American. “The researchers incorporated the scanner into a flexible, honeycombed 3-D-printed patch that can be fixed into a bra,” explains Makin. “The wearer moves the scanner among six different positions on the breast, where it snaps into place with magnets, allowing reproducible scanning of the whole breast.”
Prof. Emeritus Frank Levy and Louisiana State Prof. Scott Abrahams have published a working paper titled “The Revival of U.S. Populism: How 39 Years of Manufacturing Losses and Educational Gains Reshaped the Electoral Map,” reports Thomas B. Edsall for The New York Times. The paper makes “the case that polarization and institutional gridlock have roots dating back more than four decades,” explains Edsall.
Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Deb Roy makes the case that “new kinds of social networks can be designed for constructive communication—for listening, dialogue, deliberation, and mediation—and they can actually work.” Roy adds: “We can and should create social networks designed for public discourse that prioritize inclusion, where underheard voices and perspectives can flourish, and where people take and offer disagreement in good faith.”
Axios reporter Alison Snyder writes about how a new study by MIT researchers finds that preconceived notions about AI chatbots can impact people’s experiences with them. Prof. Pattie Maes explains, the technology's developers “always think that the problem is optimizing AI to be better, faster, less hallucinations, fewer biases, better aligned, but we have to see this whole problem as a human-plus-AI problem. The ultimate outcomes don't just depend on the AI and the quality of the AI. It depends on how the human responds to the AI.”
MIT researchers have found that user bias can drive interactions with AI chatbots, reports Nick Hilden for Scientific American. “When people think that the AI is caring, they become more positive toward it,” graduate student Pat Pataranutaporn explains. “This creates a positive reinforcement feedback loop where, at the end, the AI becomes much more positive, compared to the control condition. And when people believe that the AI was manipulative, they become more negative toward the AI—and it makes the AI become more negative toward the person as well.”
Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate Fred Salvucci BS '61 SM '62 speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about his role in Boston’s “Big Dig” project. “The idea for the Big Dig began with an unlikely friendship,” explains Coss. “During the highway debates in the early 70s, Fred Salvucci – one of the highway opponents – went to a ton of meetings. And across the table at many of those meetings was a man named Bill Reynolds; he was there to represent the road builders.”
Professor Karilyn Crockett speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about the impact of The “Big Dig” – Boston’s highway project – on the city, its people and urban planning. Crockett “argues that despite all the incentives to build, build, build, the costs of that building would eventually force city residents to think the unthinkable,” says Coss. “So the anti-highway fight becomes a moment of imagining possibilities,” says Crockett.