A new working paper by MIT researchers details how the use of a universal basic income (UBI) helped people in Kenya with difficult economic situations, writes Kelsey Piper for Vox. The researchers found that the UBI provided “income benefits in good times and then stability benefits during bad times,” says Prof. Tavneet Suri.
Writing for Indvstrvs, Prof. Eugene Fitzgerald, CEO and director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), explores new advances in silicon technologies. “With silicon computing saturating, the key to the future is interconnecting with other systems wirelessly and at lower power,” writes Fitzgerald.
CNN reporter Allen Kim spotlights how researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have modified a robotic dog so that it can be used to help measure a patient’s vital signs. “The researchers expect to focus on triage applications in the short term, with the goal of ultimately deploying robots like this to patients' hospital rooms to continuously monitor them and let doctors to check in on them without ever having to step into the room,” writes Kim.
CBS Boston features how researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital equipped a robot from Boston Dynamics with technology to enable remote vital sign monitoring.
In this video, Bloomberg News spotlights how researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a new system that facilitates remote monitoring of a patient’s vital signs, as part of an effort to help reduce healthcare workers’ Covid-19 risk. Researchers have successfully measured temperature, breathing rate, pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation in healthy patients.”
Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have repurposed a robotic dog from Boston Dynamics with technology that enables doctors to remotely measure a patient’s vital signs, reports Rick Sobey for The Boston Herald. “Using four cameras mounted on the dog-like robot, the researchers have shown that they can measure skin temperature, breathing rate, pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation in healthy patients,” writes Sobey.
Researchers from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative are teaming up with Boston’s Federal Reserve Bank to build and test a hypothetical central bank digital currency, reports Vipin Bharathan for Forbes.
A new tool developed by MIT researchers sheds light on the operations of generative adversarial network models and allows users to edit these machine learning models to generate new images, reports Daphne Leprince-Ringuet for ZDNet. "The real challenge I'm trying to breach here," says graduate student David Bau, "is how to create models of the world based on people's imagination."
On this episode of Freakonomics, Prof. Andrew Lo discusses the economics of drug development. “It’s important that we get the pricing of these vaccines correct so that they provide both a reasonable rate of return to investors who have risked their capital to develop these vaccines, while at the same time making sure that there’s no price gouging going on and that ultimately we provide access to everybody,” says Lo.
Researchers from MIT and the University of Oxford have found that guidelines for social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic may need to be updated to account for factors such as ventilation, crowd size and exposure time, reports Akshay Syal for NBC News. "It's not just 6 feet and then everything else can be ignored or just mask and everything else can be ignored or just ventilation and everything else can be ignored,” says Prof. Lydia Bourouiba.
New Scientist reporter Alice Klein writes that MIT researchers have developed a synthetic glue that could be used to line the small intestine and help treat several conditions, including diabetes and lactose intolerance. “The researchers found they could control the uptake of different nutrients,” writes Klein, “by adding various substances to the synthetic lining.”
Gizmodo reporter Ed Cara writes that a study co-authored by Prof. Lydia Bourouiba argues that social distancing guidelines likely need to be updated in favor of a more nuanced approach. The researchers found that “rather than think exclusively about personal space,” writes Cara, “people should consider their circumstances.”
A team of MIT researchers tested several different techniques for action labeling in videos and found that “older, simple, two-dimensional convolutional neural networks—a type of neural network architecture that has been around for quite a while now—worked better than much more complex, models that try to analyze the videos in three dimensions,” reports Jeremy Kahn for Fortune.
In an article for The Conversation, graduate student Silvia Danielak delves into her new research exploring why disaster management models often need to be adjusted to better serve the needs of different communities. “Paying attention to the urban disaster managers’ understanding of place-based risk sheds light on the continuously compounding vulnerability and lack of sustainable disaster risk reduction in communities at risk,” Danielak writes.
A study by researchers from MIT’s Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) finds antibiotic resistance in some types of bacteria may be reversed using hydrogen sulphide, reports Melanie Sison for SciDevNet. “This is a very exciting discovery because we are the first to show that H2S can, in fact, improve sensitivity to antibiotics and even reverse antibiotic resistance in bacteria that do not naturally produce the agent,” says Wilfried Moreira, a principal investigator at SMART.