Ms. Magazine reporter Kalindi Vora spotlights Prof. Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller and the legacy of her work in the field of science. “Through her work, [Keller] showed that objectivity, the key value of the sciences, is in fact always partially subjective,” writes Vora. “Her legacy demonstrates that diversifying the sciences will improve research and discovery.”
A number of MIT faculty and alumni – including Prof. Daniela Rus, Prof. Regina Barzilay, Research Affiliate Haddad Habib, Research Scientist Lex Fridman, Marc Raibert PhD '77, former Postdoc Rana El Kaliouby and Ray Kurzweil '70 – have been named key figures “at the forefront of Boston’s AI revolution,” reports Wyndham Lewis for Boston Magazine. These researchers are “driving progress and reshaping the way we live,” writes Lewis.
In an article for Forbes, Sloan Research Scientist Ranjan Pal and Prof. Bodhibrata Nag of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta highlight the risks associated with the rise of Internet of things-driven smart cities and homes. “Unlike traditional catastrophic bond markets, where the (natural) catastrophe does not affect financial stability, a cyber-catastrophe can affect financial stability,” they write. “Hence, more information is needed by bond writing parties to screen cyber-risk exposure to guarantee no threat to financial stability.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Stuart Madnick explains the growing risk of cybersecurity attacks and how to address them. “In many cases, companies fall victim to these attacks because they aren’t aware of the risks that they are taking, such as not confirming the quality of a vendor’s security or monitoring whether their outgoing data traffic is being transferred to improper destinations,” writes Madnick. “Organizations can, and must, do these things better to stop the continued rise in data breaches.”
Prof. Mike Stonebraker co-founded DBOS, a serverless software platform, that aims to “put a database system at the bottom of the technology stack as close to the bare metal as possible where the operating system usually sits,” reports Ron Miller for TechCrunch. “Bare metal is a term used to describe the pure hardware layer where no software exists. Flipping the OS and the database is a bold and revolutionary idea,” explains Miller.
Prof. Thomas Malone speaks with Poets & Quants for Executives reporter Alison Damast about the executive education course he teaches with Prof. Daniela Rus that aims to provide senior-level managers with a better sense of how AI works. “We are certainly not trying to teach people to understand the details of how to write AI programs, though some of those in the course may know that already,” Malone says. “What we are trying to do is give them a sense of when it is easy and when it is hard to use AI technology at various times for different kinds of business applications.”
Cognito Therapeutics, an MIT startup co-founded by Prof. Li-Huei Tsai and Prof. Ed Boyden, has developed a headset that uses light and sound to slow the cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients, reports Emily Mullin for Wired. “Cognito’s headset, dubbed Spectris, delivers flashing lights and sounds through a pair of connected glasses and headphones to stimulate gamma waves in the brain” writes Mullin. “Different types of brain waves have different paces, or frequencies. Gamma waves are fast-frequency brain waves associated with thinking skills and memory, and people with Alzheimer’s are known to have fewer of these fast brain waves.”
Prof. Edward Roberts, one of the area’s “most influential pioneers in entrepreneurship” known for his work “encouraging startups and increasing MIT’s role in the tech industry ecosystem,” has died at 88, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “There’s this narrative that you’re born to be an entrepreneur, and he did this research and debunked that,” explains Prof. Bill Aulet. “It’s impossible to go into entrepreneurship, especially in Boston, but even globally, without finding his influences.”
Prof. Philip Isola and Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speak with Associated Press reporter Matt O’Brien about AI generated images and videos. Rus says the computing resources required for AI video generation are “significantly higher than for still image generation” because “it involves processing and generating multiple frames for each second of video.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Kristin Forbes delves into her new study examining how quantitative tightening (QT) programs impact markets. “QT programs have, so far, been working as central banks intended,” Forbes writes. “At the same time, they have provided a small degree of support for central banks’ efforts to tighten financial conditions, with minimal impact on market functioning and liquidity. QT has worked in the opposite direction to quantitative easing, but the effects are much, much more muted.”
Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with CNBC reporter Kevin Williams about how the rise of generative AI technologies could lead to cyberattacks on physical infrastructure. “If you cause a power plant to stop from a typical cyberattack, it will be back up and online pretty quickly,” Madnick explains, “but if hackers cause it to explode or burn down, you are not back online a day or two later; it will be weeks and months because a lot of the parts in these specialized systems are custom made.”
Prof. Feng Zhang has been named to STAT’s 2024 STATUS List, which highlights the leaders shaping the future of health and life sciences, reports Dialynn Dwyer for Boston.com. “Among the companies he’s co-founded is Editas Medicine, which as of late 2023 was now the official holder of patent rights to the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool used in the sickle cell therapy Casgevy, and Aera Therapeutics, which in February 2023 raised $193 million in venture funding to develop protein nanoparticles as a way of delivering gene editing,” Dwyer writes.
Prof. Danielle Wood speaks with Science Friday guest host Sophie Bushwick about the importance of space law and the rules of space. “One of the things that is so helpful to think about when trying to define space law is the fact that space law, in many ways, happens at the national level and is negotiated at the international level, so we can say that the United States has both ratified and signed the outer space treaty which means it is also U.S law,” explains Wood. “I think that’s really key to keeping track of what it means for international law to be binding and I think that’s key to saying space law is meaningful especially because countries make it domestic law.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with New York Times reporter Carly Lewis about the psychological implications of receiving and sending voice memos as a method of communication. “Voice memos are essentially no risk,” says Turkle. “People are losing the capacity for empathetic conversations, which is how we connect with each other. We need to practice that. People are so worried about showing too much of themselves.”
Prof. Danielle Wood speaks with Science news intern Sean Cummings about how space exploration and research can benefit everyone. “It’s great to think about what it means for space to benefit everyone,” says Wood. “I think there are two dimensions to ask: I would first ask ‘how could I redesign space systems that were not designed for everyone but could be fixed to make them more effective?’ and the second would be ‘what about the new things we haven’t built yet?’”