Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Sherry Turkle explores how in order to fix social media platforms, we also need to alter our views on empathy and disagreement. “We lose out when we don’t take the time to listen to each other, especially to those who are not like us,” writes Turkle. “We need to learn again to tolerate difference and disagreement.”
Professor Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, speaks with Steven Zeitchik at The Washington Post about our changing understanding of the traditional office setting. “There are many jobs where physical presence is required, of course,” says Malone. “But where it isn’t, I just can’t see any reason we’ll be returning to a traditional office.”
TechCrunch reporter Mary Ann Azevedo spotlights Adam Marcus ’12 and Nitesh Banta, the co-founders of B12, a digital platform designed to establish, run and grow professional services firms online. B12 is focused on helping “smaller professional service organizations such as law and accounting firms or mortgage brokerages more easily accept online payments and build a digital presence in general,” writes Ann Azevedo.
Drew Houston ’05, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, speaks with Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner about his favorite courses and extracurriculars activities at MIT, his first computer, and the future of work at Dropbox during a recent visit to MIT where he announced a gift that will endow a professorship in the Schwarzman College of Computing. “I loved studying computer science, and I loved things like distributed systems and operating systems and algorithms,” said Houston of his time at MIT. “Those were my favorite classes. I had grown up tinkering under the hood of my computer, trying to figure out how it worked.”
Gizmodo reporter Andrew Liszewski writes that MIT researchers “used a high-resolution video camera with excellent low-light performance (the amount of sensor noise has to be as minimal as possible) to capture enough footage of a blank well that special processing techniques were able to not only see the shadow’s movements, but extrapolate who was creating them.”
MIT has been named one of the top 20 universities in the world for studying cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, reports Taylor Locke for CNBC.
Scientific American reporter Sophie Bushwick writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system that can interpret shadows that are invisible to the human eye. “The system can automatically analyze footage of a blank wall in any room in real time, determining the number of people and their actions,” writes Bushwick.
Fortune reporter Shawn Tully writes that a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that examines the amount of e-waste Bitcoin generates. The researchers found that: “In 2020, the Bitcoin network processed 120 million transactions,” writes Tully. “For every sale or purchase recorded on the blockchain, the miners disposed of e-waste equal in weight to two iPhone 12 Minis. In other words, the industry trashed the equivalent of 240 million of the 135 gram mobile devices.”
Mashable reporter Meera Navlakha writes that researchers from the MIT AgeLab have found that when using partially automated driving systems drivers may become less attentive. The researchers found that when using the Autopilot system in Tesla vehicles, “visual behaviour amongst drivers is altered before and after Autopilot is disengaged. That means before the feature is switched on/off, drivers look less on the road and pay more attention to ‘non-driving related areas.’”
Forbes reporter Aayushi Pratap spotlights Vicarious Surgical, an MIT startup and surgical robot company aimed at making “abdominal surgery faster, easier and subject to fewer complications, starting with hernia repairs.”
A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that “a single bitcoin transaction generates the same amount of electronic waste as throwing two iPhones in the bin,” reports Alex Hern for The Guardian.
TechCrunch reporter Christine Hall spotlights CodeSignal, a startup o-founded by alumnus Tigran Sloyan that is developing a skills-based assessment platform for hiring. Sloyan "got the idea for the company from an experience his co-founder and friend Aram Shatakhtsyan had while trying to find an engineering job,” writes Hall.
A new study co-authored by Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu finds that countries with older workforces are seeing a larger increase in the use of robots, reports Timothy Aeppel for Reuters. Acemoglu and his colleague Pascual Restrepo of Boston University found that “age alone accounted for 35% of the variation between countries in their adoption of robots, with those having older workers far more likely to adopt the machines.”
Graduate student Joy Buolamwini speaks with Good Morning America about her work uncovering bias in AI systems and how beauty data can marginalize people of color. “We can’t have social justice without algorithmic justice,” says Buolamwini.
Boston Magazine reporter Tom McGrath spotlights Prof. Tim Berners-Lee’s crusade to rethink the Web and build a new platform that can help users control the digital data they share. Berners-Lee’s platform, Solid, is aimed at ensuring that for the “first time ever, we users—not big tech companies—will be in control of our data, which means that websites and apps will be built to benefit us and not them,” writes McGrath. “That, in turn, could mean revolutions in things that really are consequential, from healthcare and education to finance and the World Wide Web itself.”