Say WOW

Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
New AI model could streamline operations in...
Hundreds of robots zip back and forth across the floor of a colossal robotic warehouse, grabbing items and delivering them to human workers for packing and shipping. Such warehouses are increasingly becoming part of the supply chain in many industries, from e-commerce to automotive production. However, getting 800 robots to and from their destinations efficiently while keeping them from crashing into each other is no easy task. It is such a complex problem that even the best path-finding algorithms...

Read More

Cybersecurity software wins a 2024 Federal Laboratory...
The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) has selected MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Timely Address Space Randomization (TASR) as one of the recipients of their 2024 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award. This cybersecurity technology was transferred in 2019 and 2021 to two companies that develop cloud-based services. TASR has the potential to help harden many cloud-based servers and user applications against rampant information-leakage attacks. These attacks have been involved in several recent high-profile breaches in which cyber criminals used sensitive information to...

Read More

“We offer another place for knowledge”
In the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, Jospin Hassan didn’t have access to the education opportunities he sought. So, he decided to create his own.  Hassan knew the booming fields of data science and artificial intelligence could bring job opportunities to his community and help solve local challenges. After earning a spot in the 2020-21 cohort of the Certificate Program in Computer and Data Science from MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT), Hassan started sharing MIT knowledge and skills with...

Read More

 
Generative AI for smart grid modeling
MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) has been awarded $1,365,000 in funding from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) to support its involvement with an innovative project, “Forming the Smart Grid Deployment Consortium (SGDC) and Expanding the HILLTOP+ Platform.” The grant was made available through ARC’s Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies, which fosters regional economic transformation through multi-state collaboration. Led by Kalyan Veeramachaneni, research scientist and principal investigator at LIDS’ Data to AI Group, the project will...

Read More

Putting AI into the hands of people...
As Media Lab students in 2010, Karthik Dinakar SM ’12, PhD ’17 and Birago Jones SM ’12 teamed up for a class project to build a tool that would help content moderation teams at companies like Twitter (now X) and YouTube. The project generated a huge amount of excitement, and the researchers were invited to give a demonstration at a cyberbullying summit at the White House — they just had to get the thing working. The day before the...

Read More

Faces of MIT: Lydia Brosnahan
A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into creating an art installation or a theater production – not just by those making or performing their craft, but also by the staff members who coordinate the logistics of exhibits and events. One of the people at MIT who helps artists bring their projects to life is Lydia Brosnahan.   In her role as associate producer in the Office of the Arts, Brosnahan works with several different arts initiatives including the MIT Center...

Read More

 
MIT engineers 3D print the electromagnets at...
Imagine being able to build an entire dialysis machine using nothing more than a 3D printer. This could not only reduce costs and eliminate manufacturing waste, but since this machine could be produced outside a factory, people with limited resources or those who live in remote areas may be able to access this medical device more easily. While multiple hurdles must be overcome to develop electronic devices that are entirely 3D printed, a team at MIT has taken an...

Read More

Researchers harness 2D magnetic materials for energy-efficient...
Experimental computer memories and processors built from magnetic materials use far less energy than traditional silicon-based devices. Two-dimensional magnetic materials, composed of layers that are only a few atoms thick, have incredible properties that could allow magnetic-based devices to achieve unprecedented speed, efficiency, and scalability. While many hurdles must be overcome until these so-called van der Waals magnetic materials can be integrated into functioning computers, MIT researchers took an important step in this direction by demonstrating precise control of...

Read More

Play it again, Spirio
Seated at the grand piano in MIT’s Killian Hall last fall, first-year student Jacqueline Wang played through the lively opening of Mozart’s “Sonata in B-flat major, K.333.” When she’d finished, Mi-Eun Kim, pianist and lecturer in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Section (MTA), asked her to move to the rear of the hall. Kim tapped at an iPad. Suddenly, the sonata she’d just played poured forth again from the piano — its keys dipping and rising just as they...

Read More

 
Automated method helps researchers quantify uncertainty in...
Pollsters trying to predict presidential election results and physicists searching for distant exoplanets have at least one thing in common: They often use a tried-and-true scientific technique called Bayesian inference. Bayesian inference allows these scientists to effectively estimate some unknown parameter — like the winner of an election — from data such as poll results. But Bayesian inference can be slow, sometimes consuming weeks or even months of computation time or requiring a researcher to spend hours deriving tedious...

Read More

MIT Solve announces 2024 Global Challenges and...
The driving mission of MIT Solve is inviting new voices and proposed solutions to world problems as a way to achieve a more sustainable and equitable future for all. To that end, Solve recently announced the 2024 Global Challenges and the Indigenous Communities Fellowship to help find and scale the best.  Solve invites anyone from anywhere in the world to submit a solution to this year’s Global Challenges by April 18. Solve is seeking solutions that use technology in...

Read More

Smart glove teaches new physical skills
You’ve likely met someone who identifies as a visual or auditory learner, but others absorb knowledge through a different modality: touch. Being able to understand tactile interactions is especially important for tasks such as learning delicate surgeries and playing musical instruments, but unlike video and audio, touch is difficult to record and transfer. To tap into this challenge, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and elsewhere developed an embroidered smart glove that can capture, reproduce,...

Read More

 
New model identifies drugs that shouldn’t be...
Any drug that is taken orally must pass through the lining of the digestive tract. Transporter proteins found on cells that line the GI tract help with this process, but for many drugs, it’s unknown which of those transporters they use to exit the digestive tract. Identifying the transporters used by specific drugs could help to improve patient treatment because if two drugs rely on the same transporter, they can interfere with each other and should not be prescribed...

Read More

This tiny, tamper-proof ID tag can authenticate...
A few years ago, MIT researchers invented a cryptographic ID tag that is several times smaller and significantly cheaper than the traditional radio frequency tags (RFIDs) that are often affixed to products to verify their authenticity. This tiny tag, which offers improved security over RFIDs, utilizes terahertz waves, which are smaller and travel much faster than radio waves. But this terahertz tag shared a major security vulnerability with traditional RFIDs: A counterfeiter could peel the tag off a genuine...

Read More

Stitch3D is powering a new wave of...
Workers are increasingly using 3D files to do things like assess construction projects, understand damage from natural disasters, map out crime scenes, and more. But as the importance of 3D files has grown, the problems associated with sharing, analyzing, and even viewing them have become more apparent. The issue is that many popular cloud service providers aren’t compatible with 3D files. That means in order to preview a 3D scan, users need to download the files onto a desktop...

Read More