Prof. Kate Brown speaks with Verge reporter Justine Calma about the potential implications of fighting in the containment zone around Chernobyl. “It’s a continuing problem,” Brown says. “It’s supposed to be contained. It’s supposed to be left untouched. And that’s the problem with any kind of nuclear site. It demands stability and peace.”
Prof. Julie Shah speaks with The Economist about her work developing systems to help robots operate safely and efficiently with humans. “Robots need to see us as more than just an obstacle to maneuver around,” says Shah. “They need to work with us and anticipate what we need.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that mediation apps may have benefits for users in reducing anxiety and depression, reports The Economist. “Access to the app reduced the share of participants with moderate or severe anxiety by 13 percentage points, or 50%, compared to the control group. The share of participants with moderate or severe depression fell by 14 percentage points, or 47%.”
Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with USA Today reporter Kate S. Petersen about claims that replacing all U.S. gas stations with equal capacity electric vehicle charging stations would require significant resources. “When we’re talking about EV charging, you don’t have to put charging stations everywhere you have gas stations today,” says Trancik. “This would not make sense as a plan for rolling out electric vehicle charging infrastructure.”
Prof. David Rand and Prof. Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina in Canada found that people improved the accuracy of their social media posts when asked to rate the accuracy of the headline first, reports Faye Flam for Bloomberg. “It’s not necessarily that [users] don’t care about accuracy. But instead, it’s that the social media context just distracts them, and they forget to think about whether it’s accurate or not before they decide to share it,” says Rand.
Yuanming Hu SM’19, PhD ’21 and Ye Kuang co-founded startup Taichi Graphics, a cloud-based platform which aims to make 3D content creation easier to develop, share and collaborate on, reports Rita Liao for TechCrunch. “Undergirding the platform is its open-source programming language Taichi, which offers a high-performance computation on spatially sparse data structures like those from 3D visual graphics,” writes Liao.
Researchers from MIT and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have developed a theoretical, high-performance transaction processor for a Central Bank Digital Currency using open-source software, reports Jason Brett for Forbes. "What is clear is that open-source software provides an important way to collaborate, experiment, and implement,” says Neha Narula, director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. “In addition to supporting collaboration, monetary systems benefit from transparency and verifiability, which open-source offers."
Boston Business Journal executive editor Doug Banks highlights new research from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in developing two sets of computing source code for a hypothetical Central Bank Digital Currency. The researchers “selected concepts from cryptography, distributed systems, and blockchain technology to build and test platforms that would give policymakers substantial flexibility in the potential creation of a CBDC,” writes Banks.
Reuters reporter Jonnelle Marte writes that researchers from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have developed two different approaches to processing transactions in a hypothetical digital currency. “The first phase of the multi-year project, dubbed ‘Project Hamilton,’ resulted in code that is capable of handling 1.7 million transactions per second,” writes Marte. “Researchers also found the ‘vast majority’ of transactions settled in under two seconds.”
Bloomberg reporter Allyson Versprille spotlights how researchers from MIT and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have released a new paper and open-source code, called OpenCBDC, aimed at furthering understanding of how a hypothetical central bank digital currency might be developed. Of the importance of making the software open-source, Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, explains that “we believe that this is the best way to ensure that OpenCBDC is vetted by a large number of people--all of whom will bring unique knowledge, skills, and ideas for improvement.”
Researchers from MIT and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have released a new paper and open-source code to help further understanding of how a hypothetical central bank digital currency might be developed, writes Tory Newmyer for The Washington Post. Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative, explains that they aimed to “create a flexible system that can work with a variety of models.”
Boston Globe reporter Jim Puzzanghera writes that researchers from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have developed experimental open-source software, called OpenCBDC, to help further examine a potential Central Bank Digital Currency. Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative, said she was optimistic that they could develop a system that “can help preserve strong privacy for users.”
Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), a cryptographic method invented by three MIT researchers in 1985, enables authentication of private information without revealing information that could be compromised, reports Victor Shilo for Forbes. “ZKP has the potential to protect privacy in a wide range of cases,” writes Shilo. “By implementing ZKP, businesses and society can evolve to ‘open data 2.0’ where daily transactions are completed in today’s digital economy but without disclosing unnecessary sensitive information.”
Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini writes for The Atlantic about the dangers posed by government agencies adopting the use of facial recognition technology. “No biometric technologies should be adopted by the government to police access to services or benefits,” writes Buolamwini, “certainly not without cautious consideration of the dangers they pose, due diligence in outside testing, and the consent of those exposed to potential abuse, data exploitation, and other harms that affect us all.”
Prof. David Autor speaks with New York Times columnist Peter Coy about the new book he wrote with Prof. David Mindell and Elisabeth Reynolds, “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines.” Autor explains that: “Most people’s fear of technology is really a fear of capitalism, what the markets will do with the technology. You can’t make a lot of progress if you’re making people poorer at the same time.”