Collaboration

Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Nicole Estephan of WCVB-TV’s Chronicle about her work developing new AI systems that could be used to help diagnose breast and lung cancer before the cancers are detectable to the human eye.

New York Times reporter Natasha Singer spotlights the Day of AI, an MIT RAISE program aimed at teaching K-12 students about AI. “Because AI is such a powerful new technology, in order for it to work well in society, it really needs some rules,” said MIT President Sally Kornbluth. Prof. Cynthia Breazeal, MIT’s dean of digital learning, added: “We want students to be informed, responsible users and informed, responsible designers of these technologies.”

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and others are working to build SPARC, a prototype device that aims to extract net energy from plasma and generate fusion power, reports Philip Ball for Scientific American. “SPARC will be a midsize tokamak in which the plasma is tightly confined by very intense magnetic fields produced by new high-temperature superconducting magnets developed at MIT and unveiled in 2021.”  

Soledad O’Brien spotlights how researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital developed a new artificial intelligence tool, called Sybil, that an accurately predict a patient’s risk of developing lung cancer. “Sybil predicted with 86 to 94 percent accuracy whether a patient would develop lung cancer within a year,” says O’Brien.

NBC News highlights how researchers from MIT and MGH have developed a new AI tool, called Sybil, that can “accurately predict whether a person will develop lung cancer in the next year 86% to 94% of the time.” NBC News notes that according to experts, the tool "could be a leap forward in the early detection of lung cancer.”

Researchers at MIT developed a system that uses artificial intelligence to help predict future risk of developing breast cancer, reports Poppy Harlow for CNN. What this work does “is identifies risk. It can tell a woman that you’re at high risk for developing breast cancer before you develop breast cancer,” says Larry Norton, medical director of the Lauder Breast Center at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed “Sybil” – an artificial intelligence tool that can predict the risk of a patient developing lung cancer within six years, reports Mallika Marshall for CBS Boston. 

MIT researchers have developed a new AI tool called Sybil that could help predict whether a patient will get lung cancer up to six years in advance, reports Pranshu Verma for The Washington Post.  “Much of the technology involves analyzing large troves of medical scans, data sets or images, then feeding them into complex artificial intelligence software,” Verma explains. “From there, computers are trained to spot images of tumors or other abnormalities.”

Forbes has named Commonwealth Fusion Systems one of the biggest tech innovations and breakthroughs of 2022, reports Bernard Marr. “Commonwealth Fusion Systems is now working with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center on plans to build a factory that can mass-produce components for the first commercial fusion reactors,” writes Marr.

Writing for Times Higher Ed, Prof. Andres Sevtsuk explores how campus design can boost communication and exchange between researchers. “Low-rise, high-density buildings with interconnected walkways and shared public spaces are more likely to maximize encounters,” writes Sevtsuk. “In colder climates, having indoor walking paths between buildings can help ensure that encounters continue during colder parts of the year.”

Researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab have found that academics missed out on forming new connections during Covid-19 lockdowns, hindering academic collaboration, reports Tom Williams for Times Higher Education. “Colleagues associated more with previous collaborators, which could create closed loops of communication, rather than with new potential collaborators, which enables the critical exchange that stimulates research and innovation,” says postdoctoral researcher Daniel Carmody.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), an MIT spinout, has signed an agreement with the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) to “support the fastest path to clean commercial fusion energy,” reports Ed Browne for Newsweek. “CFS says its agreement with UKAEA could involve exchanges of knowledge and collaboration on things like fuel, modeling, manufacturing and maintenance,” writes Browne. 

Researchers from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are working on making commercial nuclear fusion a reality, reports Juandre for Popular Mechanics. “CFS will build [the tokamak] SPARC and develop a commercial fusion product, while MIT PSFC will focus on its core mission of cutting-edge research and education,” says Prof. Dennis G. Whyte, director of the PSFC. 

A new study by MIT researchers examines how different spaces such as cafeterias can help foster collaboration on academic campuses, reports Paul Basken for Times Higher Ed. “The method affirms expectations that colleagues working physically nearer to each other are more likely to find each other, and that the odds of connection are higher between locations with indoor pathways,” writes Basken.

The MIT AI Hardware Program seeks to bring together researchers from academia and industry to “examine each step of designing and manufacturing the hardware behind AI-powered technologies,” reports Emily Bamforth for EdScoop. “This program is about accelerating the development of new hardware to implement AI algorithms so we can do justice to the capabilities that computer scientists are developing,” explains Prof. Jesús del Alamo.