School of Engineering

Mike Beigel ‘70, who invented Mu-Tron III, considered to be “the first commercial envelope filter pedal [that] allowed guitar players to achieve a synthesizer-like sound” used in popular 1970s music, has died at 79, reports Alex Williams for The New York Times. “The Mu-Tron III was the most renowned of several effects pedals that Mr. Beigel invented for Musitronics, a New Jersey-based company that he co-founded in 1972,” writes Williams. Musitronics, “produced a variety of sought-after pedals, including the Mu-Tron Octave Divider, Phasor, Flanger and Bi-Phase, which have been adopted by notables like Neil Young, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers guitarist.” 

CodeSignal, co-founded by alumnus and CEO Tigran Sloyan, has developed Agentic Skills Intelligence, a new product that “uses AI agents to evaluate the skills people use in their work and links the findings to personalized practice,” writes Forbes’ Ray Ravaglia. CodeSignal has built an AI agent “for each domain in its job taxonomy, such as engineering and sales, along with agents for capabilities that cut across jobs, among them communication and AI literacy,” notes Ravaglia. “The agents draw on systems including Gong, Salesforce, and GitHub, and they score what they find against rubrics the company says are grounded in industrial-organizational psychology.” 

BIOSENTER, a soft, snake-like robot developed by MIT researchers, could autonomously snap photos, administer drugs, and take small biopsy samples within cramped and difficult to reach areas of the body such as the small intestine, writes Mack DeGeurin for Popular Science. “BIOSENTER has four inflatable chambers arranged along either side of its tubular body. These chambers inflate and deflate in alternating combinations, which is how it moves forewarn and bends to change directions,” explains DeGeurin. “Keeping with the snake theme, the robot’s exterior is fitted with a textured, scale-like coating that improves its traction.”  

Prof. Sanjay Sarma speaks to Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai about the difficulty of developing dexterous robots for use in the home versus developing factory machines for use in standardized plants. “Heavy work, hazardous tasks have long been the focus of automation,” says Sarma. “Robots seem to be following an evolutionary path–the finer the motor or cognitive skills required, the harder to automate.”  

MIT researchers have developed BIOSENTER, a soft robot inspired by the movement of snakes, “designed to navigate the twists and turns of the small intestine [that] could perform real-time imaging, deliver drugs, and take biopsies deep within the digestive tract,” reports Inside Precision Medicine. “The robot’s tube-like body contains four inflatable chambers that can expand or contract in different combinations, allowing the robot to move forward and bend in different directions. A hollow central channel allows the robot to carry endoscopic tools, including a camera for imaging, a fluid sprayer for drug delivery, and clips for collecting tissue samples or removing small polyps.” 

Arcaea, a biotech beauty company founded by CEO Jasmina Aganovic ‘09, has partnered with the actress and producer Jennifer Lawrence to develop mes°, a new haircare brand, reports Flavio Gomez for the Los Angelos Times. “A TED Talk by Aganovic, an MIT-trained chemical and biological engineer exploring how biology can open new possibilities in beauty, prompted the two to connect and eventually develop the brand,” notes Gomez. “Instead of treating each [hair] concern as an isolated problem, the brand looks to biology for ways to address it.”  

Prof. Ryan Williams speaks to TechCrunch’s Tim Fernholz about AI platforms refuting the Exponential Time Hypothesis, part of a broader class of problems known as P versus NP. “I do think that it kind of calls into question a lot of the intuitions that we thought we had about … how tractable [hard NP problems] are. I also think that this is probably not the final answer either,” says Williams. AI is “forcing people to be a little more ambitious about the kind of work that they do, and to think more deeply about, okay, if all the things I used to work on are now low-hanging fruit for AI, how can I raise the bar for the kind of scientific questions I want to ask?” 

Research Scientist Judah Cohen joins Fox News to discuss the potential for a historic, massive polar vortex disruption, or early season weakening, that “could send atmospheric impacts rippling across the planet in the weeks or even months to come.” Cohen says, “this will, I think almost undoubtedly, be the largest, earliest disruption of the polar vortex on record. What the impacts could be on a regional basis is really hard to know. Everything is possible. Traditionally it [the disruption] is thought to bring colder and snowier weather to the eastern U.S. about two weeks after the event kind of peaks, but in recent history that has not been the case.”  

Prof. Suraj Cheema joins Edgar B. Herwick, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” to discuss the functionality and global development of computer chips. “The know-how of how to make these chips is very specialized,” says Cheema. “Imagine there’s 100 steps in the process, not just that printer that costs a few $100 million, just all these other kinds of steps that go along with it. We have 20 million transistors in this little chip. We want them all to work. They all have to work [for the chip to function].”  

Forbes reporter Marshall Shepherd highlights the Probabilistic Bias Correction tool, a new AI system developed by MIT researchers that could extend weather forecasting predictability beyond two weeks.  

The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney spotlights the “Bounce juggler (W.C. Fields),” a machine modeled after the comedian W.C. Fields, on display at the MIT Museum, that juggles three metal balls and was created by the late Prof. Claude Shannon SM ’40, PhD ’40. “It’s one thing to be known as ‘the father of information theory,’ as Shannon is. His work in mathematics, electrical engineering, cryptography, and computer science was that important,” writes Feeney. “But Shannon was also a chess player, unicyclist, juggler, and inventor. Shannon combined his talent for engineering and imagination with his love of humor and juggling in the ‘Bounce juggler.’”  

Instead of giving AI agents a specific task, MIT researchers put 13 agents, named Eko, alone on a digital desert island for 30 hours, and witnessed the technology playing instead of simply wandering around, writes Fast Company’s Jude Cramer. “The researchers compared Eko’s behavior to common elements of play in animals, including humans,” notes Cramer. “These signs of play include creating their own rules, repeating behaviors with slight variations, setting goals for themselves, and transforming objects and events through make-believe.” 

After observing the behavior of 13 AI agents on a simulated desert island, MIT researchers suggest that allowing agents to explore “without a goal” could be an effective way to teach AI agents new skills, reports Aditya Mehta for TechCrunch. “We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress,” the researchers write. “Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows.” 

Flapping Airplanes, a startup co-founded by Benjamin Spector ’22, MEng ’22, has developed a framework for AI models to run efficiently while being trained on less data and in a single graphics processing unit (GPU), writes Julie Bort for TechCrunch. The framework “can run a task that spends most of its time waiting for data to be fetched alongside one that spends most of its time doing math, so the chip is rarely sitting idle,” notes Bort. “The premise is that AI has barely scratched the surface of what GPUs can do, and they believe it can create intelligent systems ‘without ingesting half the internet.’”  

Eka Robotics, a startup cofounded by Prof. Pulkit Agrawal, has developed a robot with  a force-sensitive gripper that can “pick up about 1,500 objects that weigh up to 1 kg in an hour, compared to about 600 for a human” with 95% accuracy, reports Tim Fernholz for TechCrunch.  “We are starting off being very pragmatic, and saying here are two verticals in pick, arrange, place, and wire handling, let’s make them be home runs,” says Agrawal. “Once we have made home runs on them, the sky is the limit in how much we can do with the approach we are developing.”