STAT reporter Casey Ross writes about how MIT researchers have developed a new ingestible Prof. Timothy Lu explains that he hopes that the sensor “opens up a really new window into how the gut and the rest of the body are connected, and hopefully provide new diagnostic strategies as well.”
In an article for Axios, Prof. Carlo Rati writes about how developments in automated vehicles and smart infrastructure could be used to help make cities safer. “Developing technology for AVs to communicate with other vehicles as well as infrastructure like streets, traffic lights and road signs could both improve safety and decrease congestion,” writes Ratti.
Associated Press reporter Tali Arbel writes that MIT researchers have found that Amazon’s facial detection technology often misidentifies women and women with darker skin. Arbel writes that the study, “warns of the potential of abuse and threats to privacy and civil liberties from facial-detection technology.”
A new study by Media Lab researchers finds that Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition system performed more accurately when identifying lighter-skinned faces, reports Drew Harrell for The Washington Post. The system “performed flawlessly in predicting the gender of lighter-skinned men,” writes Harrell, “but misidentified the gender of darker-skinned women in roughly 30 percent of their tests.”
Verge reporter James Vincent writes that Media Lab researchers have found that the facial recognition system Rekognition performed worse at identifying an individual’s gender if they were female or dark-skinned. In experiments, the researchers found that the system “mistook women for men 19 percent of the time and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time,” Vincent explains.
MIT researchers have found that the Rekognition facial recognition system has more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces than similar services, reports Natasha Singer for The New York Times. Graduate student Joy Buolamwini said “the results of her studies raised fundamental questions for society about whether facial technology should not be used in certain situations,” writes Singer.
New Yorker contributor Caroline Lester writes about the Moral Machine, an online platform developed by MIT researchers to crowdsource public opinion on the ethical issues posed by autonomous vehicles.
HealthDay reporter Steven Reinberg writes that a new study by Prof. Siqi Zheng finds that air pollution can make people unhappy. Zheng found that, “On days with high levels of pollution, people are more likely to engage in impulsive and risky behavior that they may later regret, possibly because of short-term depression and anxiety,” writes Reinberg.
Inverse reporter Emma Betuel reports on a new study by MIT researchers showing that air quality impacts the happiness of people living in cities in China. “When the air is polluted people stay home, they don’t go out, and they order food delivery while staying home playing computer games and shopping online,” explains Prof. Siqi Zheng.
By analyzing posts on social media in China, Prof. Siqi Zheng has found that air pollution can cause increased levels of depression and unhappiness, reports Adele Peters for Fast Company. “We want to show that there’s a wider range of the social cost of air pollution,” explains Zheng.
MIT researchers have developed a new high-resolution technique to image the brain that could be used to create more precise maps of the brain and identify the causes of brain disease, reports Megan Thielking for STAT. “If we can figure out exactly where diseases begin,” explains Prof. Edward Boyden, “that could be pretty powerful.”
Prof. Pattie Maes writes for Wired about how wearable medical technology is becoming an increasingly mainstream component of therapeutic intervention. “While we need to be careful to make sure these designs safeguard privacy, give complete control to the user and avoid dependency whenever possible,” writes Maes, “there are countless possibilities for digital, wearable technologies to supplement and even replace traditional drugs and therapy.”
Writing for Wired, Prof. Carlo Ratti predicts that in 2019 researchers will develop new methods for allowing people to use the internet in less intrusive ways. “The internet of things will continue to grow, and we will work out more ways to develop ‘things’ that allow us to enjoy the internet without being overwhelmed by it,” writes Ratti.
Boston Globe reporter Martin Finucane writes that MIT researchers have developed a new way to fabricate tiny objects. “The researchers are currently able to create objects that are around 1 cubic millimeter, with features as small as 50 nanometers,” Finucane explains. “The tiny structures could be useful in fields from optics to medicine to robotics.”
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can shrink objects to the nanoscale using a laser, reports Lauren Kent for CNN. Kent explains that the technology “could be applied to anything from developing smaller microscope and cell phone lenses to creating tiny robots that improve everyday life.”