Prof. Canan Dagdeviren and colleagues at MIT have developed a wearable sensor that could help more easily detect breast cancer. “Dr. Dagdeviren hopes the device will allow for more frequent screening of women who are at high risk of developing breast cancer, such as those who had inherited the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, or people who have had cancer previously,” writes Sarah Knapton for The Telegraph.
Researchers at MIT have developed a wearable ultrasound patch that could be used to allow women to monitor themselves for early signs of breast cancer, reports Amy Norton for HealthDay. “The hope is to one day use such portable technology to help diagnose and monitor a range of diseases and injuries – in a way that’s more accessible and cheaper than using traditional scanners housed at medical facilities,” explains Norton.
Researchers at MIT have developed a “flexible patch that can take ultrasound images comparable to those done by medical centers, but can fit into a bra,” reports Sara Kiley Watson for Popular Science. “The researchers tested their device on a 71-year-old subject with a history of breast cysts, and were able to detect cysts as small as 0.3 centimeters in diameter up to 8 centimeters deep in the tissue, all while maintaining a resolution similar to traditional ultrasounds,” writes Kiley Watson.
At CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus Bob Metcalfe '69 showcased how the many individual bits of innovation that emerged from the Telnet Protocol later become the foundation for email, writes Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, for Forbes. “Looking ahead to the future of connectivity, Metcalfe spoke of the challenges of limited network bandwidth, and the importance of keeping connectivity firmly in mind when developing any new computing technologies,” writes Rus.
MIT researchers have designed a wearable ultrasound device that attaches to a bra and could be used to detect early-stage breast tumors, reports Lizzy Lawrence for STAT. “I’m hoping to really make it real, and to touch people’s lives,” says Prof. Canan Dagdeviren. “I want to see the impact of my technology not only in the lab, but on society.”
AP reporter Ronald Blum spotlights the premiere of Prof. Jay Scheib’s augmented reality-infused production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “We sort of focus on a future society in which myth has become possible again," says Scheib. "But at the same time, we’re not that far in the future and the third act is set around a broken lithium-ion field. We’re set in a world that is somehow post-planet and post-collapse of energy production.”
At CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, Prof. Stefanie Jegelka’s presentation provided insight into “the failures and successes of neural networks and explored some crucial context that can help engineers and other human observers to focus in on how learning is happening,” reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes.
Prof. Jacob Andreas explored the concept of language guided program synthesis at CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes. “Language is a tool,” said Andreas during his talk. “Not just for training models, but actually interpreting them and sometimes improving them directly, again, in domains, not just involving languages (or) inputs, but also these kinds of visual domains as well.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, emphasizes the central role universities play in fostering innovation and the importance of ensuring universities have the computing resources necessary to help tackle major global challenges. Rus writes, “academia needs a large-scale research cloud that allows researchers to efficiently share resources” to address hot-button issues like generative AI. “It would provide an integrated platform for large-scale data management, encourage collaborative studies across research organizations, and offer access to cutting-edge technologies, while ensuring cost efficiency,” Rus explains.
Writing for Forbes, research affiliate John Werner spotlights Prof. Stefanie Mueller’s presentation at the CSAIL Imagination in Action event on her work developing a new type of paint that allows users to change the color and pattern of different objects. “The long-term vision here, really, is to give those physical objects the same capabilities as we have in digital,” said Mueller. “I hope in the future we will all get some free stuff, and we would just have an [app] where we can download different textures we can apply, and change our outfits.”
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.”
A study by researchers from MIT and Stanford University explored how customer service agents use generative AI chatbots in their response to tech support questions, reports Meghan McCarty for Marketplace. “The most experienced workers see no to even small negative effects of the AI being turned on for them, while the less-experienced and least-productive workers see on average 30 to 35% improvements in productivity,” explains graduate student Lindsey Raymond.
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.
In conversation with Matthew Huston at Science, Prof. John Horton discusses the possibility of using chatbots in research instead of humans. As he explains, a change like that would be similar to the transition from in-person to online surveys, “"People were like, ‘How can you run experiments online? Who are these people?’ And now it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course you do that.’”
Researchers from MIT have found that using generative AI chatbots can improve the speed and quality of simple writing tasks, but often lack factual accuracy, reports Richard Nieva for Forbes. “When we first started playing with ChatGPT, it was clear that it was a new breakthrough unlike anything we've seen before,” says graduate student Shakked Noy. “And it was pretty clear that it was going to have some kind of labor market impact.”