Prof. Edward Boyden speaks with Boston Globe reporter Murray Carpenter about how scientists need more powerful computers to help gain a better understanding of brain function. “The cool part of neuroengineering is that we have all these unmet needs,” Boyden says. “I think there is an enormous amount of hope generated by bringing new tools into neuroscience.”
In this Today Show segment, Prof. Earl Miller and Prof. Robert Desimone discuss how the brain reacts to the information overload that comes from using multiple digital tools at once. “The brain has a great deal of difficulty processing multiple bits of data at once,” explains Miller. "We are very, very single minded.”
In this video, Prof. Edward Boyden speaks with The Huffington Post about how sleep and meditation impact people on a neurological level. Boyden says that traditions such as mediation can “help us be more attuned to what our mind really wants.”
BetaBoston reporter Nidhi Subbaraman writes about Koko, an app developed by MIT researchers that allows users to crowdsource advice. “It’s really teaching people to think more flexibly about stressful situations,” said MIT alumnus and co-founder Robert Morris.
Cade Metz writes for Wired that MIT researchers have developed a system that allows robots to predict how objects will move. Postdoc Ilker Yildirim explains that in order for a robot to be able to assist with household tasks like washing the dishes, it must “deeply understand its physical environments.”
MIT computer scientists have developed a program that can predict how objects will move with the same accuracy as humans, reports Mary Beth Griggs for Popular Science. The researchers hope to eventually be able to program the system to “make predictions in the natural world even faster than we can.”
An AI system created by MIT researchers can predict how physical objects move through the world with human-like accuracy, reports Curt Woodward for BetaBoston. “Where humans learn to make such judgments intuitively, we essentially had to teach the system each of these properties,” explains postdoc Ilker Yildirim.
In an article for The Boston Globe’s special section about the 2015 Bostonians of the Year, Sharon Begley writes about the work of Prof. Feng Zhang. Begley writes that Zhang, "is one of the world’s most creative and influential biological engineers, able to see possibilities where others don’t.”
Lindsay Holmes writes for The Huffington Post about Koko, an application developed by MIT researchers to help users fight stress by crowdsourcing their questions and worries. “We want to take the same principles that keep our eyes glued to Facebook and Instagram 24 hours a day and redirect them to promote well-being,” explains founder Robert Morris.
MIT researchers have identified a link between reduced neurotransmitter activity and the symptoms of autism, reports Carolyn Gregoire for The Huffington Post. The findings “may pave the way for new methods of treating and diagnosing” autism.
MIT researchers have identified the region of the brain that perceives music, reports Emily Reynolds for Wired. The researchers found that one area of the brain “responded most to music, another to speech, and the other four to different acoustic properties such as pitch and frequency.”
Huffington Post reporter Lila Shapiro speaks with Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute, about the use of the CRISPR gene-editing technique to treat neurological diseases. “CRISPR’s impact is potentially across the board,” says Desimone. “It went from nothing just a few years ago to being a tool that’s in everyone’s toolbox.”
A new learning program developed by researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto imitates the way humans learn, according to EFE. The researchers aim to “reduce the difference in learning capability between humans and machines.”
Researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto have created a learning program that can grasp new concepts just like humans do, reports Will Dunham for Reuters. “Judges found the work produced by the computers to be virtually indistinguishable from that of human subjects,” explains Dunham.
A new advance in machine learning allows a computer program to recognize and draw handwritten characters based off a few examples, reports John Markoff for The New York Times. Markoff explains that the “improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life.”