MIT researchers have developed a new system to detect contaminated food by scanning a product’s RFID tags, reports Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch. The system can “tell the difference between pure and melamine-contaminated baby formula, and between various adulterations of pure ethyl alcohol,” Coldewey explains.
Katharine Schwab of Fast Company writes about the Media Lab’s Moral Machine project, which surveyed people about their feelings on the ethical dilemmas posed by driverless vehicles. Because the results vary based on region and economic inequality, the researchers believe “self-driving car makers and politicians will need to take all of these variations into account when formulating decision-making systems and building regulations,” Schwab notes.
Graduate students Ziv Epstein and Matt Groh have developed an AI system that adds spooky figures to photos, reports Mark Wilson for Fast Company. Wilson writes that the system “works so well because it places ghostly figures exactly where your brain naturally thinks they could be–on a path in the middle of a forest, rather than, say, floating randomly through the air.”
Motherboard reporter Kaleigh Rogers writes that MIT researchers have developed an AI system that can generate scary-sounding music. Rogers explains that the researchers used a “huge number of midi files and a handful of horror movies soundtracks as ‘primer melodies’ to give the AI a starting point to make up the rest of the soundtrack.”
BBC News highlights how Media Lab researchers have built a software program that allows web users to suggest actions for a hired actor to perform. Researchers are “keen to see whether internet users can work together to issue a consistent series of commands to the actor that help complete the game, or whether the commands will be discordant.”
Lucas Laursen writes for Fortune that a global survey created by MIT researchers uncovered different regional attitudes about how autonomous vehicles should handle unavoidable collisions. Global carmakers, Laursen writes, “will need to use the findings at the very least to adapt how they sell their increasingly autonomous cars, if not how the cars actually operate.”
MIT researchers created an online game to determine how people around the world think autonomous vehicles should handle moral dilemmas, reports Laurel Wamsley for NPR. “Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms,” the researchers explain, “and to the policymakers that will regulate them.”
BBC News reporter Chris Fox writes that MIT researchers surveyed people about how an autonomous vehicle should operate when presented with different ethical dilemmas. Fox explains that the researchers hope their findings will “spark a ‘global conversation’ about the moral decisions self-driving vehicles will have to make.”
MIT researchers conducted a global survey to determine how people felt about the ethical dilemmas presented by autonomous vehicles, The Economist reports. Prof. Iyad Rahwan explains that he and his colleagues thought it was important to survey people from around the world as “nobody was really investigating what regular people thought about this topic.”
Boston Magazine’s Matthew Reed Baker highlights Prof. Tod Machover’s new opera, “Schoenberg in Hollywood.” Baker writes that “in typically Machoverian fashion, the production uses mixed media and time jumps” as it explores composer Arnold Schoenberg’s flight from Nazi Germany to California.
Popular Mechanics reporter Dave Grossman writes that MIT researchers surveyed more than 2 million people to gauge people’s opinions on the ethics of autonomous vehicles. Grossman explains that the researchers believe their findings demonstrate how “people across the globe are eager to participate in the debate around self-driving cars and want to see algorithms that reflect their personal beliefs.”
MIT students, who were disappointed by articles depicting AI as a fast-approaching threat, are training AI to create new ideas in fashion, food, art, and dance that are then created by humans, writes Kaveh Waddell of Axios. MIT postdoc Pinar Yanardag, the project founder, envisions a future where humans work with AI to boost their creativity.
BBC Click spotlights a new semi-autonomous, wearable robot developed by MIT researchers that takes different types of measurements from the skin to identify conditions such as skin cancer. “The doctor can see your whole body, but the doctor doesn’t pick up the small changes in your skin conditions, which the robot can do,” says graduate student Artem Dementyev.
As part of Wired’s 25 anniversary festival, Prof. Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, leads a conversation with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman about “blitzscaling,” which encourages new companies to prioritize speed over efficiency. Ito points out that blitzscaling technology “accelerates you in the direction you are already going,” making it hard to correct any issues that arise early on.
Quartz reporter Zoë Schlanger writes that a new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how climate change can negatively impact a person’s mental health. The researchers found that “on average, the mental health of low-income people was most harmed by hotter temperatures. Women, on average, were also harmed more than men.”