In this video for Wired, Prof. Anne White explains the nature of nuclear fusion in five levels of increasing difficulty to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. “Fusion is so exciting because it is extraordinarily beautiful physics, which underpins some of the most basic processes in our universe," says White. “Nuclear processes have a tremendously valuable application for humankind, a virtually limitless, clean, safe, carbon-free form of energy.”
During her talk at CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, explored the promise of using liquid neural networks “to solve some of AI’s notorious complexity problems,” writes research affiliate John Werner for Forbes. “Liquid networks are a new model for machine learning,” said Rus. “They're compact, interpretable and causal. And they have shown great promise in generalization under heavy distribution shifts.”
In an article for Forbes, research affiliate John Werner spotlights Prof. Dina Katabi and her work showcasing how AI can boost the capabilities of clinical data. “We are going to collect data, clinical data from patients continuously in their homes, track the symptoms, the evolution of those symptoms, and process this data with machine learning so that we can get insights before problems occur,” says Katabi.
Institute Prof. Bob Langer speaks with Curiosity podcast hosts Immad Akhynd and Raj Suri about his work in the field of biotechnology, delving into how he has co-founded 40 companies. “I wanted to get out and do some good in the world,” says Langer. “That's where patents come in and that's where companies come in. And I think the challenge of the company is very different because you have what I call a platform technology.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi speaks with Marketplace host Meghan McCarty Carino about how AI has impacted the workplace, highlighting the wide deployment of robots in warehouses. “Instead of people running around the warehouses, the people stand and the robots run around the warehouses,” Sheffi said. “But they bring the work to the people who then put it in boxes, package them.”
Forbes reporter Stuart Anderson spotlights a number of international students who became founders of top U.S. AI companies, including MIT alumni Sébastien Boyer MS '16 and Aditya Khosla PhD '16. Boyer co-founded “FarmWise, which employs AI for precision weeding on farms,” and Khosla co-founded PathAI, a biotech startup that uses AI to “optimize the analysis of patient tissue samples and for other clinical and diagnostic purposes,” writes Anderson.
Researchers from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are using high-temperature superconducting tape as a key part of the design for their tokamak reactor, reports Tom Clynes for IEEE Spectrum. The researchers believe that “this novel approach will allow it to build a high-performance tokamak that is much smaller and less expensive than would be possible with previous approaches,” Clynes notes.
Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Nicole Estephan of WCVB-TV’s Chronicle about her work developing new AI systems that could be used to help diagnose breast and lung cancer before the cancers are detectable to the human eye.
Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota SB '08, MS '16, MBA '16 writes for Forbes about the ethical framework needed to mitigate risks in artificial intelligence. “[A]s we continue to unlock AI's capabilities, it is crucial to address the ethical challenges that emerge,” writes Hayes-Mota. “By establishing a comprehensive ethical framework grounded in beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice and responsibility, we can ensure that AI's deployment in life sciences aligns with humanity's best interests.”
Researchers at MIT have developed a soft robot that can be controlled by a weak magnetic field and travel through tiny spaces within the human body, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “Because of their soft materials and relatively simple manipulation, researchers believe such mechanisms could be used in biomedical situations, such as inching through human blood vessels to deliver a drug at a precise location,” explains Paul.
Writing for Forbes, Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, makes the case that liquid neural networks “offer an elegant and efficient computational framework for training and inference in machine learning. With their compactness, adaptability, and streamlined computation, these networks have the potential to reshape the landscape of artificial intelligence and drive further breakthroughs in the field.”
Sublime Systems, a startup founded by Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang and former MIT postdoc Leah Ellis, is working to decarbonize cement making – a process which currently accounts for eight percent of global carbon emissions. “The world has a huge appetite for cement, and Sublime is working to scale its production to meet it,” writes Casey Crownhart for The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter.
MIT has been selected as the world’s best university in the 2024 QS World University Rankings, reports Cecilia Rodriguez for Forbes. MIT has secured “the top position for the 12th consecutive year,” writes Rodriguez.
Prof. Yang Shao-Horn spoke at the State of the Art Jewelry Summit to discuss the jewelry industry’s impact on carbon emissions and sustainability efforts, reports Caroline Palmer for the Financial Times. Shao-Horn's suggestions to tackle the problem involved a mix of a carbon tax, “which could encourage the use of new technology, including electric vehicles, as well as shifting mining practices away from open site to the development of mobile mining vehicles powered by renewable energy or hydrogen,” writes Palmer.
MIT researchers have discovered an RNA-guided DNA-cutting enzyme in eukaryotes, reports Science. “The researchers speculate that eukaryotic cells may have gained the newly identified editing genes from transposable elements—so-called jumping genes—they received from bacteria,” writes Science.