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NBC

Prof. Jacopo Buongiorno speaks with NBC reporter Catherine Clifford about the future of nuclear energy in the United States. “The US may catch up if the new technologies being developed here — small modular reactors and microreactors above all — will prove to be technically and commercially successful, which is currently uncertain,” says Buongiorno.

Boston Magazine

Prof. Jinhua Zhao writes for Boston Magazine about how artificial intelligence could help improve the MBTA system. “When something significant happens on public transportation—the line is down, the road is congested, some bridge is blocked—the customer is suddenly stuck in the system and needs more help,” writes Zhao. “For when that happens, we developed a solution to send individualized guidance for a better transit option to that person, communicated by text message or an app.”

Popular Science

Prof. Yoon Kim speaks with Popular Science reporter Charlotte Hu about how large language models like ChatGPT operate. “You can think of [chatbots] as algorithms with little knobs on them,” says Kim. “These knobs basically learn on data that you see out in the wild,” allowing the software to create “probabilities over the entire English vocab.”

Nature

Prof. Scott Stern co-leads the Place-Based Innovation Policy Study Group – “a group of academics, practitioners and NSF staff that aims to deploy ‘timely insight for the NSF Regional Innovation Engines program,’” reports Nature. Stern and his colleagues are “providing an assessment of the ‘state of knowledge’ of place-based innovation ecosystems and their relationship to geographical and socio-economic inclusion,” writes Nature.

The Hill

Writing for The Hill, Andre Zollinger, senior policy manager at J-PAL Global, makes the case that “current attention to air pollution can be transformational for how we tackle climate change. Policy leaders in the U.S. and abroad should seize this moment of reckoning over our common struggle for clean air as an opportunity to focus on policies that are known to curb air pollution and simultaneously combat climate change.”

NPR

Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan speaks with Sarah Gonzalez of NPR’s Planet Money about why European workers tend to be allotted more vacation time than workers in the U.S. Kochan notes that “if given the option, workers are historically more interested in seeing their take-home pay increase than they are in getting another day or week of vacation,” particularly when they have to cover the costs of health insurance.

Nature

Nature reporter Andrew Robinson spotlights “Atlas of the Senseable City” a new book co-authored by Prof. Carlo Ratti. The book is a “highly illustrated collection of digital maps,” Robinson notes, adding that it “analyzes four essential urban dimensions: motion, connection, circulation and experience.”

The Guardian

Prof. D. Fox Harrell writes for The Guardian about the importance of ensuring AI systems are designed to “reflect the ethically positive culture we truly want.” Harrell emphasizes that: “We need to be aware of, and thoughtfully design, the cultural values that AI is based on. With care, we can build systems based on multiple worldviews – and address key ethical issues in design such as transparency and intelligibility."

The Boston Globe

Ivan Sutherland PhD ’63, whose work “laid some of the foundations of the digital world that surrounds us today,” speaks with Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner about the importance of fun and play in advancing technological research. “You’re no good at things you think aren’t fun,” Sutherland said. If you want to expand the scope of what’s possible today, he noted, “you need to play around with stuff to understand what it will do, and what it won’t do.”

Politico

Prof. Amy Finkelstein speaks with Politico reporters Erin Schumaker, Daniel Payne and Evan Peng about her new book “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” “Health insurance is not delivering on its function,” says Finkelstein. “Over 1 in 10 Americans under 65 are uninsured at any given moment, and of the 30 million Americans who are uninsured, 6 in 10 are eligible for free or heavily discounted health insurance coverage. And yet they don’t have that coverage.”

The New York Times

This past spring, Prof. J. Phillip Thompson and MIT lecturer Elisabeth Reynolds taught a class at MIT that sent students to work with local officials across the country to help identify available federal funds for climate change mitigation, reports Farah Stockman for The New York Times. “We have to figure out how to use it. Because if we don’t, wealthy communities will go green, and low-income communities will stay brown,” says Thompson. “Unless we do something intentionally to make sure that it is fair, it will bypass poor communities.”

KQED

Prof. Adam Berinsky speaks with "Our Body Politic" host Farai Chideya about his new book “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight it.” Berinksky explains that the, "mere questioning of political reality can have serious downstream consequences because sowing doubt about political policies and claims is much easier than resolving such doubt,” says Berinsky. 

Fortune

Fortune reporter John Singer spotlights Prof. Amy Finkelstein’s new book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” The book details “an approach that could potentially transform the multi-dimensional dysfunctionality that is the U.S. healthcare system,” writes Singer.

Financial Times

Prof. David Autor speaks with Delphine Strauss of the Financial Times about the risks AI poses to jobs and job quality, but also the technology’s potential to help rebuild middle-class jobs. “The good case for AI is where it enables people with foundational expertise or judgment to do more expert work with less expertise,” says Autor. He adds, “My hope is that we can use AI to reinstate the value of skills held by people without as high a degree of formal education.”

CNBC

MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese speaks with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin about the state of the U.S. economy and the impact of “Bidenomics,” President Joe Biden’s economic philosophy.