Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma spotlights BitSight, a cybersecurity ratings company founded by MIT graduates. “The company’s platform uses algorithms to assess a company’s chances of being breached,” writes Verma. “It also provides customers with cybersecurity ratings, risk metrics, and security benchmarks to better assess and combat cyber threats.”
Prof. David Autor speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about the impact of Covid-19 on the future of work.
A study by MIT researchers finds that crowdsourced fact-checking of news stories by laypeople tend to be just as effective as professional fact-checkers, writes David Scharfenberg for The Boston Globe. The researchers found that “even when pooling a relatively small number of laypeople’s evaluations, the correlation between laypeople’s and fact-checkers’ evaluations was about the same as the correlation among the fact-checkers’.”
Mashable reporter Matt Binder writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that crowdsourced fact-checking of news stories can be as effective as using professional fact-checkers. “The study is positive news in the sense that everyday newsreaders appear to be able to, mostly, suss out misinformation,” writes Binder.
Postdoc Freddy Nguyen, former co-director of the MIT Hacking Medicine hackathon, speaks with Forbes contributor Michelle Greenwald about how transitioning to virtual hackathons during the Covid-19 pandemic shed light on how to improve hackathons going forward. "One of the benefits of being virtual was that it allowed participants from around the globe that normally couldn’t afford the airfare or time to go to overseas, to take part,” writes Greenwald. “As a result, there were more participants, more diversity of thought, and a wider range of mentors involved, comporting well with MIT’s belief that great ideas can come from anywhere.”
Matthew Shifrin writes for The Boston Globe about his personal experience using the TRANSFORM device created by the Tangible Media Group, an interactive display that fuses technology and design to render 3-D models in real-time. Shifrin, who is blind, notes that TRANSFORM allowed him “to track facial expressions like a sighted person would, and its larger size lets me feel the nuances that I can’t feel on a real face.”
Motherboard reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley spotlights Unit, a new digital platform developed by MIT graduate James Earl White that is aimed at easing the unionization process. Gurley writes that White “founded Unit after volunteering with several labor organizing campaigns in college, and studying how unions can reduce income inequality.”
Fast Company reporter Mark Wilson writes that MIT researchers have developed a new online search engine that allows users to “type in one of 1,757 different technologies, and get one sharp number, which is its expected rate of improvement each year.”
CNBC reporter Dain Evans writes about how researchers from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve of Boston are exploring what a digital currency might look like in America. “I think that if there is a digital dollar, privacy is going to be a very, very important part of that,” says Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab.
Writing for The Boston Globe, research scientist Lisa D’Ambrosio emphasizes how “caregiving faces an innovation gap. Although there is plenty of inventive energy pouring into some caregiving needs, the core tasks of caregiving — the ones requiring the most intensive, even laborious attention — appear to be last in line for a technological helping hand.”
Writing for Issues in Science and Technology, President L. Rafael Reif examines Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking 1945 Science, the Endless Frontier report and considers how our needs today have changed. “To meet this moment, we need to ensure that our federally sponsored research addresses questions that will enhance our competitiveness now and in the future,” writes Reif. “Our current system has many strengths…but we must not allow these historical advantages to blind us to gaps that could become fatal weaknesses.”
Vice reporter Radhamely De Leon spotlights how researchers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon University have created “a search engine tool that shows what Google search results appear in different countries or languages, highlighting key differences in the algorithm between regions.”
Boston Globe reporter Laura Krantz reports that edX will be transferred to the education technology company 2U, and proceeds from the transaction will be used by a nonprofit aimed at addressing education inequalities and reimagining the future of learning.
Wall Street Journal reporter Melissa Korn writes that 2U, an education technology company, will acquire edX for $800 million. The proceeds flow to a new nonprofit, led by MIT and Harvard, which will “focus on reducing inequalities in access to education. It will maintain the open-access course platform built by edX, research online and hybrid-learning models, and work to minimize the digital divide that still serves as a barrier for many younger students and adults,” writes Korn.
Prof. Danielle Wood has been named to Bloomberg’s list of catalysts who are inspiring “new ideas, fresh thinking and novel approaches to old quandaries. But most importantly, they incite action,” writes Andrew Browne for Bloomberg. “Wood uses her expertise to harness space technology for development challenges around the world,” writes Laura Bolt.