Writing for The New York Times, research scientists Chelsea Barabas and Karthik Dinakar argue that risk assessment algorithms designed to help predict people’s future criminal behavior are “fundamentally flawed. They give judges recommendations that make future violence seem more predictable and more certain than it actually is. In the process, risk assessments may perpetuate the misconceptions and fears that drive mass incarceration.”
Wired reporter Elizabeth notes how the ScratchJr programming language, which was developed to help teach children how to code, is being used as part of an effort to teach young children the basics of computer programming.
Reporting for NBC Mach, Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky writes that MIT researchers are developing augmented plants that can serve as sensors. Jeffrey-Wilensky explains that the researchers believe the plants could one day be used to “guard our homes, connect us to distant friends and send us gentle push notifications without the sensory overload of a computer screen.”
Popular Mechanics reporter Dave Grossman writes that MIT researchers are “utilizing plants' natural abilities of sensory detection and attempting to co-join them with modern tech.”
Daily Beast reporter David Axe spotlights graduate student Guillermo Bernal’s work developing virtual reality avatars that can convey realistic human emotions. “As this medium moves forward, this and other tools are what will help the field of virtual reality expand from a medium of surface-level experience to one of deep, emotionally compelling human-to-human connection,” Bernal explains.
Motherboard reporter Rob Dozier writes about Glitch, an MIT startup that uses machine learning to design clothing. “These tools are meant to empower human designers,” explains graduate student Emily Salvador. “What I think is really cool about these creative-focused AI tools is that there’s still this really compelling need for a human to intervene with the algorithm.”
Forbes reporter Joe McKendrick highlights a Nature review article by MIT researchers that calls for expanding the study of AI. “We’re seeing the rise of machines with agency, machines that are actors making decisions and taking actions autonomously," they write. "This calls for a new field of scientific study that looks at them not solely as products of engineering and computer science.”
In an article for Wired, Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, argues that rules and regulations must be established to ensure the responsible exploration of space. “As space becomes more commercial and pedestrian like the internet, we must not allow the cosmos to become a commercial and government free-for-all with disregard for the commons and shared values,” writes Ito.
Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, writes for Wired about the decision to grant Amazon the .amazon domain and how the International Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN) evaluates such decisions. “The job of ICANN is to govern the name space in an open and inclusive process and to steward this process in the best, but never perfect, way possible,” writes Ito.
Smithsonian reporter Rachael Lallensack spotlights how MIT alumnus Anirudh Sharma developed a commercial ink from air pollution. Sharma explains that he hopes the ink, which is now on display at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, inspires others “to start looking at new forms of waste that are lying outside, unutilized.”
In an article for Gizmodo, Dell Cameron writes that graduate student Joy Buolamwini testified before Congress about the inherent biases of facial recognition systems. Buolamwini’s research on face recognition tools “identified a 35-percent error rate for photos of darker skinned women, as opposed to database searches using photos of white men, which proved accurate 99 percent of the time.”
Wired reporter Lily Hay Newman highlights graduate student Joy Buolamwini’s Congressional testimony about the bias of facial recognition systems. “New research is showing bias in the use of facial analysis technology for health care purposes, and facial recognition is being sold to schools,” said Buolamwini. “Our faces may well be the final frontier of privacy.”
Research scientist César Hidalgo speaks with Kara Miller of WGBH’s Innovation Hub about his work exploring collective memory and how society experiences generational forgetting. For things like popular songs “there is a period of up to five years when they are still in our communicative memory, we are still talking about it," Hidalgo explains. “After that they go into our cultural memory.”
WCVB-TV’s Mike Wankum visits the Media Lab to learn more about a new wearable device that allows users to communicate with a computer without speaking by measuring tiny electrical impulses sent by the brain to the jaw and face. Graduate student Arnav Kapur explains that the device is aimed at exploring, “how do we marry AI and human intelligence in a way that’s symbiotic.”
Fast Company reporter Eillie Anzilotti highlights how MIT researchers have developed an AI-enabled headset device that can translate silent thoughts into speech. Anzilotti explains that one of the factors that is motivating graduate student Arnav Kapur to develop the device is “to return control and ease of verbal communication to people who struggle with it.”