Wired reporter Will Knight spotlights a new working paper by graduate students Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang examining the impact of providing office workers access to ChatGPT for use in a series of office tasks. The researchers found “people with access to the chatbot were able to complete the assigned tasks in 17 minutes, compared to an average 27 minutes for those without the bot, and that the quality of their work improved significantly,” writes Knight.
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray writes that MIT researchers have used an AI system to identify a potential new Covid-19 vaccine that may be effective against both current and future variants of the virus. “The new vaccine targets a portion of the COVID virus that is much less prone to evolve,” writes Bray. “That could potentially make it effective against many different versions of the virus, eliminating the need for routine booster shots.”
MIT researchers have developed a new approach to vaccines that uses “a machine learning twist [that] could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots,” reports Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch.
Chronicle visits the new MIT Museum, highlighting a number of exhibits, including one exploring the research behind the hunt for gravitational waves and another that examines the impacts humans are having on the environment. “We try to be a window, going both ways, between MIT and the rest of the public,” explains Prof. John Durant, director of the MIT Museum. “We’re also trying to get people to have a glimpse of how a world-class research institution actually works.”
Aagya Mathur MBA ’18 co-founded Aavia, a daily ovarian hormone health guide, reports Matt Symonds for Forbes. “We started Aavia to give young people tools to understand how their hormones impact how they feel,” Mathur explains.
Researchers at MIT developed a system that uses artificial intelligence to help predict future risk of developing breast cancer, reports Poppy Harlow for CNN. What this work does “is identifies risk. It can tell a woman that you’re at high risk for developing breast cancer before you develop breast cancer,” says Larry Norton, medical director of the Lauder Breast Center at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Joy Buolamwini PhD ’22 has been named one of Diverse: Issues in Higher Education’s Top Women for 2023 for her work in developing “more equitable and accountable technology.” Buolamwini “uncovered racial and gender bias in AI services from high profile companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Amazon. Now a sought-after international speaker, Buolamwini continues to advocate for algorithmic justice,” writes Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.
Dean Daniel Huttenlocher joins CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” to discuss the current state of AI and how generative AI advances could impact our future. “These recent advances in generative AI technology really do represent a completely different capability in computing than anything we have experienced,” says Huttenlocher. “This is the first tech that can create humanlike expression.”
Graduate student Ziv Epstein speaks with Vice reporter Rachel Cheung about the legal implications of the development and use of AI tools being used to create art. “We need more both technical and social research, understanding how these things work, how people feel about them, and then we can make those decisions based on good science,” Epstein said. “Because right now, we’re just really at the brink of the beginning.”
MIT researchers have constructed a mini city to test to safely test algorithms designed for autonomous vehicles, reports Mashable. “The idea of the mini city is that we have lots of cars going at the same time and we can actually test out new algorithms in a safe environment,” says graduate student Noam Buckman.
Washington Post reporter Michael Andor Brodeur spotlights Prof. Tod Machover’s work exploring the concepts and techniques needed to advance the future of music, including using AI to help “exponentially increase access to music and creative tools for making it.” Machover explains that to him “pieces of music aren’t just pieces of sound. They’re because some human being thought something was important to communicate and express.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Scientific American reporter Nora Bradford about recent advancements in the field of soft robotics. “Building soft robots that can work, heal and grow independently could change many areas of human life,” says Rus. “Soft robot hands are enabling a new age for manufacturing.”
Xander, an MIT spinoff founded by Alex Westner SM ’98, has developed glasses that generate real-time captions of conversations for the wearer, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “The glasses have their own processor and front-facing microphones and are designed to convert conversational speech into text captions,” writes Pressman.
Researchers at MIT have developed an autonomous vehicle with “mini sensors to allow it to see the world and also with an artificially intelligent computer brain that can allow it to drive,” explains postdoctoral associate Alexander Amini in an interview with Mashable. “Our autonomous vehicles are able to learn directly from humans how to drive a car so they can be deployed and interact in brand new environments that they’ve never seen before,” Amini notes.
Boston.com reporter Melissa Ellin spotlights the MIT AgeLab’s Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES), “a suit that allows wearers to feel what it is like to be 80 years old with some chronic health conditions,” writes Ellin. The suit was recently featured in “Limitless with Chris Hemsworth,” a docuseries highlighting scientific research and insight into the human body.