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Fast Company reporter AJ Hess spotlights “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishments Without Burnout,” a new book by Cal Newport SM '06, PhD '09. The book “traces the history of measuring workers’ output and the rise of knowledge workers’ stress and burnout,” explains Hess. “As an antidote, Newport proposes what some may argue is an oversimplified solution: simply do less.”
U.S. News & World Report reporter Cole Claybourn spotlights Amar Gopal Bose '51, SM '52 ScD '56, a former MIT faculty member, as one of fifteen famous Fulbright scholars. Bose, founder of Bose Corporation, “studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a full scholarship, earning his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering,” writes Claybourn.
Researchers at MIT have found that large language models mimic intelligence using linear functions, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Even though these models are really complicated, nonlinear functions that are trained on lots of data and are very hard to understand, there are sometimes really simple mechanisms working inside them,” writes Wiggers.
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that uses a large language model to allow robots to self-correct after making a mistake, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “Researchers behind the study note that while imitation learning (learning to do a task through observation) is popular in the world of home robotics, it often can’t account for the countless small environmental variations that can interfere with regular operation, thus requiring a system to restart from square one,” writes Heater. “The new research addresses this, in part, by breaking demonstrations into smaller subsets."
Harry Rein '15, MEng '16 and Chris Tinsley MBA '20 co-founded ShopMy, a marketing platform designed to connect content creators with brands and monetize their content, reports Laruen Forristal for TechCrunch. “ShopMy’s marketing platform equips creators with the tools they need to earn from their product recommendations, like building digital storefronts, accessing a catalog of millions of products, making commissionable links and chatting directly with companies via mobile app,” explains Forristal.
Prof. Pulkit Agrawal and graduate student Gabriel Margolis speak with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about the simulation research and technology used in developing intelligent machines. “Simulation is a digital twin of reality,” says Agrawal. “But simulation still doesn’t have data, it is a digital twin of the environment. So, what we do is something called reinforcement learning which is learning by trial and error which means that we can try out many different combinations.”
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.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about the history and future of artificial neural networks and their role in large language models. “The early artificial neuron was a very simple mathematical model,” says Rus. “The computation was discrete and very simple, essentially a step function. You’re either above or below a value.”
Wardah Inam SM '12, PhD '16 founded Overjet, an AI platform that helps dentists “diagnose diseases from scans and other data,” reports Saritha Rai for Bloomberg. “Dentistry was more art than science, and I wanted to bring technology and AI to help dentists make objective decisions,” says Inam. “We began building and then improving our AI systems with tens of millions of pieces of data, including X-rays, historical information, dentist notes, and periodontal charts.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Evan Sellinger about her new book, “The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future With Robots,” in which she makes the case that in the future robots and humans will be able to team up to create a better world. “I want to highlight that machines don’t have to compete with humans, because we each have different strengths. Humans have wisdom. Machines have speed, can process large numbers, and can do many dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks,” Rus explains. “I see robots as helpers for our jobs. They’ll take on the routine, repetitive tasks, ensuring human workers focus on more complex and meaningful work.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III and Ben Adida PhD ’06 speak with Fast Company reporter Spenser Mestel about how to restore the public’s faith in voting technology. Adida discusses his work launching VotingWorks, a non-profit focused on building voting machines. VotingWorks is “unique among the legacy voting technology vendors," writes Mestel. “The group has disclosed everything, from its donors to the prices of its machines.”
Los Angeles Times reporter Gustavo Arellano spotlights Democratic Senator Alex Padilla ’94 and his political career in California. Padilla “realized the only way to make things better for the Valley’s growing Latino community, in an era of anti-immigrant sentiment across California, was to elect politicians who looked like them,” writes Arellano.
Prof. Erik Demaine speaks with Boston Globe reporter Cate McQuaid about how combining the art of origami with computer science has enhanced his work in both fields. “We get stuck on a science problem and that inspires a new sculpture, or we get stuck trying to build a sculpture,” says Demaine, “and that leads to new science.”