School of Engineering

Undergraduate student Isabella Struckman and Sofie Kupiec ’23 reached out to the first hundred signatories of the Future of Life Institute’s open letting calling for a pause on AI development to learn more about their motivations and concerns, reports Will Knight for Wired. “The duo’s write-up of their findings reveals a broad array of perspectives among those who put their name to the document,” writes Knight. “Despite the letter’s public reception, relatively few were actually worried about AI posing a looming threat to humanity.”

Researchers from MIT and BU have developed the Cleana toilet seat, a set of non-electric automatic lifting and lowering toilet seats that aim to make bathrooms more sanitary, reports Rob Way for WHDH.   

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with TechCrunch reporter Brain Heater about liquid neural networks and how this emerging technology could impact robotics. “The reason we started thinking about liquid networks has to do with some of the limitations of today’s AI systems,” says Rus, “which prevent them from being very effective for safety, critical systems and robotics. Most of the robotics applications are safety critical.”

Vaikkunth Mugunthan MS ’19 PhD ‘22 and Christian Lau MS ’20, PhD ’22 co-founded DynamoFL – a software company that “offers software to bring large language models (LLMs) to enterprise and fine-tune those models on sensitive data,” reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Generative AI has brought to the fore new risks, including the ability for LLMs to ‘memorize’ sensitive training data and leak this data to malicious actors,” says Mugunthan. “Enterprises have been ill-equipped to address these risks, as properly addressing these LLM vulnerabilities would require recruiting teams of highly specialized privacy machine learning researchers to create a streamlined infrastructure for continuously testing their LLMs against emerging data security vulnerabilities.”

MIT researchers have developed a new tool called “PhotoGuard” that can help protect images from AI manipulation, reports Ross Cristantiello for Boston.com. The tool “is designed to make real images resistant to advanced models that can generate new images, such as DALL-E and Midjourney,” writes Cristantiello.

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.”

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that journals and academic papers should be evaluated using a “diversity factor,” a metric aimed at improving representation across research, reports Patrick Jack for Times Higher Education. Jack notes that the researchers see the diversity factor as a “‘call to action’ for improved representation and to prevent the perpetuation of biases against certain subgroups.”

Sean Hunt MS ’13 PhD ’16 co-founded Solugen, a startup working to develop industrial chemicals with environmentally friendly ingredients, reports David H. Freedman for Newsweek. “The company's goals over the next seven years are to reduce the carbon emissions released by industry into the environment by an amount equivalent to eliminating 2 million cars, and to make enough bioplastic to get rid of 5 billion non-degradable plastic bottles,” writes Freedman.

Undergraduate student Manaal Mohammed, one of six members of the 2023 New York Times Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship, discusses the inspiration for the crossword she recently cooked up that is “full of references with personal significance,” reports Caitlin Lovinger for The New York Times. Mohammed’s “humor in the entries is quite effective, with some dry notes and some goofy connections,” Lovinger notes. “This puzzle is inspired by the many pastas my mom made over the years because I was too picky to eat other food,” says Mohammed.

Researchers at MIT have developed “PhotoGuard,” a tool that can be used to protect images from AI manipulation, reports Catherine Thorbecke for CNN. The tool “puts an invisible ‘immunization’ over images that stops AI models from being able to manipulate the picture,” writes Thorbecke.

A number of MIT alumni including Elaheh Ahmadi, Alexander Amini, and Jose Amich have been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Local Boston list.

Researchers at MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have published a paper showcasing the development of OncoNPC, an artificial intelligence model that can predict where a patient’s cancer came from in their body, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. This information “can help determine more effective treatment decisions for patients and caregivers,” writes Tran.

Fast Company reporter Adele Peters writes that MIT researchers have developed a new type of concrete that can store energy, potentially enabling roads to be transformed into EV chargers and home foundations into sources of energy. “All of a sudden, you have a material which can not only carry load, but it can also store energy,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm.

MIT engineers have uncovered a new way of creating an energy supercapacitor by combining cement, carbon black and water  that could one day be used to power homes or electric vehicles, reports Jeremy Hsu for New Scientist. “The materials are available for everyone all over the place, all over the world,” explains Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “Which means we don’t have the same restriction as with batteries.”

MIT researchers have discovered that when combined with water, carbon black and cement can produce a low-cost supercapacitor capable of storing electricity for later use, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “With some further fine-tuning and experimentation, the team believes their enriched cement material could one day compose portions of buildings’ foundations, or even create wireless charging,” writes Paul.