The Media Lab will serve as one of the first anchor institutions for a new initiative, the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, which will “support research and development to make AI beneficial for humans,” reports Jordan Graham for the Boston Herald.
The Media Lab will serve as a founding institution for a new effort focused on advancing artificial intelligence research for the public good, reports April Glaser for CNBC. Research will focus on everything from investigating how” socially responsible artificially intelligent systems can be designed” to fostering “understanding of the complexities of artificial intelligence.”
Kevin Murnane of Forbes spotlights five innovations developed by CSAIL researchers in 2016. Murnane highlights an ingestible origami robot, a 3-D printed robot with solid and liquid components, a robot that can assist with scheduling decisions, an artificial neural network that can explain its decisions, and an algorithm that can predict human interactions.
Howard Shrobe, head of the Cybersecurity@CSAIL initiative, discusses the possibility of creating a computer system that can’t be hacked in a CNBC article. “What we need to think about are the architectural principles that would govern secure designs,” writes Shrobe. “Memory safety errors are a key part of well over 50 percent of the vulnerabilities.”
Prof. Stuart Madnick writes for CNBC about how corporations can protect themselves from the growing threat of cyber crime. “It is up to senior business leaders to take the lead in protecting their organizations,” writes Madnick. “That can only be accomplished by working together with government, industry, and academia.”
Daniel Akst of The Wall Street Journal writes that by bouncing electromagnetic waves off of pages, MIT researchers have developed a way to read closed books. The system could potentially be used also be used to count stacks of money and detect counterfeit currency, Akst explains.
A new device developed by MIT researchers can read the pages of a book without opening the cover, reports Nsikan Akpan for the PBS NewsHour. The tool may “unlock the secrets of old books or ancient texts too fragile to be disturbed by human touch.”
MIT researchers have developed a system that uses terahertz waves to read the pages of a closed book, reports Michael Casey for the AP. Research scientist Barmak Heshmat explains that the system works better than X-rays, as “it can contrast between the blank paper and the part that has ink.”
Writing for CBS News, Charles Choi explores a system developed by MIT researchers that can identify letters in a closed book. The system could be used to examine ancient books or to “scan through large amounts of documents without having to mechanically separate the pages, which could be useful for libraries, banks and others,” says research scientist Barmak Heshmat.
Salon reporter Scott Eric Kaufman writes that MIT researchers have created a system that can read the pages of a closed book and could be used to examine manuscripts too fragile to handle. “The system works by shooting pulses of radiation from a terahertz camera and measuring how long it takes for them to bounce back."
MIT researchers have developed a new computational imaging technique that can read closed books, reports G. Clay Whittaker for Popular Science. The technique could be useful for “rare book research, where opening a book may be impossible due to damage, or not worth the risk of damage.”
MIT researchers have developed an artificial intelligence platform that uses input from human analysts to predict cyber-attacks, reports Brian Mastroianni for CBS News. “We realized, finding the actual attacks involved a mix of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning,” explains research scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni.
Wired reporter Brian Barrett writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system to help detect cyber-attacks. Barrett explains that the system, “reviews data…and pinpoints anything suspicious. A human takes it from there, checking for signs of a breach. The one-two punch identifies 86 percent of attacks while sparing analysts the tedium of chasing bogus leads.”
In a talk at MIT, Robert Hannigan, director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, expressed his hope that “technology companies and academic researchers will find ways to let government investigators get into encrypted devices without creating broad ‘back doors’ that undermine computer security,” writes Brian Bergstein for Technology Review.
In an article for The Washington Post, Daniel Weitzner writes that the U.S. government should respond to greater calls for access to communication and data in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks by “strengthening the public policy framework that governs surveillance, both domestically and globally.”