Arts

Paul Ha, director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, is serving as one of the advisors to Simone Leigh, the first Black artist selected to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, reports Andrea Shea for WBUR.

Fast Company reporter Mark Wilson spotlights Prof. Ekene Ijeoma’s project, A Counting, which aims to capture audio recordings of the more than 1,300 languages that Americans speak. “The question for A Counting is how we can count to a whole using everyone’s voices to represent,” says Ijeoma, “not just languages, but voices and accents as a way of representing their cultural and ethnic identities.”

A new tool developed by MIT researchers sheds light on the operations of generative adversarial network models and allows users to edit these machine learning models to generate new images, reports Daphne Leprince-Ringuet for ZDNet. "The real challenge I'm trying to breach here," says graduate student David Bau, "is how to create models of the world based on people's imagination."

Boston 25’s Chris Flanagan reports that MIT researchers developed a website aimed at educating the public about deepfake technology and misinformation. “This project is part of an awareness campaign to get people aware of what is possible with both AI technologies like our deepfake, but also really simple video editing technologies,” says Francesca Panetta, XR creative director at MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality.

MIT researchers created a deepfake video and website to help educate the public of the dangers of deepfakes and misinformation, reports Mike Wall for Space.com. “This alternative history shows how new technologies can obfuscate the truth around us, encouraging our audience to think carefully about the media they encounter daily,” says Francesca Panetta, XR creative director at MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality.

Scientific American explores how MIT researchers created a new website aimed at exploring the potential perils and possibilities of deepfakes. “One of the things I most love about this project is that it’s using deepfakes as a medium and the arts to address the issue of misinformation in our society,” says Prof. D. Fox Harrell.

Boston Globe reporters Patricia Harris and David Lyon spotlight MIT’s public art collection. “A striking collection of modern sculpture, much of it tucked away in secluded courtyards and grassy quads,” they write. “Large-scale sculpture lives at the nexus of art and architecture,” adding that MIT, “has always been a school of imaginative can-do.”

Gizmodo reporter Andrew Liszewski writes that CSAIL researchers have developed “a new spray-on ink that can infinitely change colors, designs, and patterns when blasted with different wavelengths of light.”

New tools developed by CSAIL researchers allow users to design a pattern that can be used to 3D print knitted garments, reports Elizabeth Segran for Fast Company. “We’re exciting about how this can be used by everyday, nonexpert knitters,” says graduate student Alexandre Kaspar. “This lets anybody become a designer.”

7 News spotlights how CSAIL researchers have developed two new software systems that are aimed at allowing anyone to customize and design their own knitted design patterns. “The researchers tested the software by having people with no knitting experience design gloves and hats,” explains 7 News reporter Keke Vencill.

Graduate student Alexandre Kaspar speaks with BBC Click about two new systems that ease the process of designing and making knitted clothing items. Kaspar explains that the systems allow users to “create building blocks of parts that are being knit.”

TechCrunch reporter Catherine Shu writes that CSAIL researchers have developed two new systems that enable users to design and customize their own knitted items, no knitting experience required. Shu explains that the researchers want “to make designing and making machine-knitted garments as accessible as 3D printing is now.”

MIT researchers have created an app that translates proteins into music, reports Eva Amsen of Forbes. This method could potentially be used to “make it easier to process very subtle changes that would be less obvious if you looked at the data visually,” Amsen explains.

Prof. Markus Buehler speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research, which attempts to better understand and create new proteins by translating them into music. Buehler explains that they were able to listen to proteins after discovering that “amino acids have a unique frequency spectrum which we could then make audible using a concept of transposition.”

Diana Cai writes for STAT about Prof. Markus Buehler’s new research to turn amino acids into music. “Buehler thinks the technology could help in understanding genetic diseases caused by misfolded proteins,” writes Cai, noting that, “AI may conceivably ‘hear’ patterns of misfolding that could distinguish dangerous mutations from harmless ones.”