Letter regarding graduate student unionization election

The following letter was sent to MIT graduate students, and subsequently shared with the wider MIT community, today by Chancellor Melissa Nobles and Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian A. Waitz. To MIT graduate students, The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has counted the ballots from the graduate student unionization election held on […]

Emery Brown earns American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Pierre Galletti Award

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering has awarded its highest honor this year to Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Health Sciences and Technology in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. Brown, who is also an […]

An optimized solution for face recognition

The human brain seems to care a lot about faces. It’s dedicated a specific area to identifying them, and the neurons there are so good at their job that most of us can readily recognize thousands of individuals. With artificial intelligence, computers can now recognize faces with a similar efficiency — and neuroscientists at MIT’s […]

Twitter changed how embeds work for deleted tweets, causing blank spaces on websites; Twitter says it is “to better respect” when users deleted their tweets (Kevin Marks)

Kevin Marks: Twitter changed how embeds work for deleted tweets, causing blank spaces on websites; Twitter says it is “to better respect” when users deleted their tweets  —  Twitter Edits You 2022-04-06 With all the fuss about Twitter’s promised edit button, and how they might design it …

Sky Mavis, which runs Axie Infinity, raises $150M led by Binance, with participation from Animoca, a16z, and others, to reimburse users after the Ronin exploit (Vishal Chawla/The Block)

Vishal Chawla / The Block: Sky Mavis, which runs Axie Infinity, raises $150M led by Binance, with participation from Animoca, a16z, and others, to reimburse users after the Ronin exploit  —  Sky Mavis, the creator of play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, has raised $150 million to reimburse its users who lost funds during …

Inside Kyiv’s IT office, whose workers have spent the past five weeks adapting and repurposing everyday tech, like the Kyiv Digital smartphone app, for wartime (Vera Bergengruen/TIME)

Vera Bergengruen / TIME: Inside Kyiv’s IT office, whose workers have spent the past five weeks adapting and repurposing everyday tech, like the Kyiv Digital smartphone app, for wartime  —  Even the app’s logo reflects this shift.  What was once a friendly sky-blue “K” for Kyiv has been redesigned into a black-and-gray military camo pattern.

QS World University Rankings rates MIT No. 1 in 12 subjects for 2022

MIT has earned a No. 1 spot in 12 subject areas, according to the QS World University Rankings for 2022, announced today. The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Chemistry; Computer Science and Information Systems; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Materials Science; […]

Does this artificial intelligence think like a human?

In machine learning, understanding why a model makes certain decisions is often just as important as whether those decisions are correct. For instance, a machine-learning model might correctly predict that a skin lesion is cancerous, but it could have done so using an unrelated blip on a clinical photo. While tools exist to help experts […]

Ocean vital signs

Without the ocean, the climate crisis would be even worse than it is. Each year, the ocean absorbs billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, preventing warming that greenhouse gas would otherwise cause. Scientists estimate about 25 to 30 percent of all carbon released into the atmosphere by both human and natural sources is […]

Twitter requires removing tweets posted by government or state-affiliated media accounts that contain media of prisoners of war from the Russia-Ukraine conflict (Mitchell Clark/The Verge)

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Twitter requires removing tweets posted by government or state-affiliated media accounts that contain media of prisoners of war from the Russia-Ukraine conflict  —  It’ll ‘ask government or state-affiliated media accounts’ to take down pictures featuring prisoners of war

Dropbox Shop, which lets creators sell digital content directly to customers, launches an open beta in the US with more store customization options and tipping (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Dropbox Shop, which lets creators sell digital content directly to customers, launches an open beta in the US with more store customization options and tipping  —  Dropbox Shop, a platform that allows creators to sell digital content directly to their customers, is now available in open beta, Dropbox announced on Tuesday.

Canada’s government introduces legislation that would force major online platforms run by Google and Meta to negotiate deals with publishers, like in Australia (John Paul Tasker/CBC News)

John Paul Tasker / CBC News: Canada’s government introduces legislation that would force major online platforms run by Google and Meta to negotiate deals with publishers, like in Australia  —  Bill demands that companies like Google and Facebook pay news businesses to use their content

What Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means for the world

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has global implications. A panel of MIT foreign policy experts convened on Monday to examine those reverberations — on European domestic politics, the refugee crisis, great-power relations, and nuclear security. Currently Ukraine has experienced widespread devastation, and millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes as refugees. Many countries have allied to […]

Study reveals the dynamics of human milk production

For the first time, MIT researchers have performed a large-scale, high-resolution study of the cells in breast milk, allowing them to track how these cells change over time in nursing mothers. By analyzing human breast milk produced between three days and nearly two years after childbirth, the researchers were able to identify a variety of […]

Internal Amazon documents show its planned internal messaging app would block union-related words, including “union”, “grievance”, and “pay raise” (Ken Klippenstein/The Intercept)

Ken Klippenstein / The Intercept: Internal Amazon documents show its planned internal messaging app would block union-related words, including “union”, “grievance”, and “pay raise”  —  Amazon will block and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining …

FTX makes a “significant” investment in stock exchange IEX, made famous by Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys”; IEX represented 2.7% of US equities volume in March (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: FTX makes a “significant” investment in stock exchange IEX, made famous by Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys”; IEX represented 2.7% of US equities volume in March  —  Crypto exchange FTX US agreed to take a stake in IEX Group Inc., owner of the stock exchange made famous by …

System helps severely motor-impaired individuals type more quickly and accurately

In 1995, French fashion magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a seizure while driving a car, which left him with a condition known as locked-in syndrome, a neurological disease in which the patient is completely paralyzed and can only move muscles that control the eyes. Bauby, who had signed a book contract shortly before his accident, […]

Roku and Amazon extend their distribution agreement, letting users continue accessing Prime Video and IMDb TV apps on their Roku devices; Roku stock is up 5%+ (Etan Vlessing/Hollywood Reporter)

Etan Vlessing / Hollywood Reporter: Roku and Amazon extend their distribution agreement, letting users continue accessing Prime Video and IMDb TV apps on their Roku devices; Roku stock is up 5%+  —  The new multi-year agreement means the Amazon Prime Video app will remain in Roku’s Channel Store.

Research: RT en Español is the third-most shared site on Twitter for Spanish-language info about Russia’s invasion and in March saw a boost in Facebook likes (Associated Press)

Associated Press: Research: RT en Español is the third-most shared site on Twitter for Spanish-language info about Russia’s invasion and in March saw a boost in Facebook likes  —  Disinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is surging in Spanish, as stories crafted for a Latin American audience gets a boost from the Kremlin

Former ByteDance employees say the company scraped Instagram, Snap, and others to make fake accounts on TikTok predecessor Flipagram, later renamed Vigo Video (Emily Baker-White/BuzzFeed News)

Emily Baker-White / BuzzFeed News: Former ByteDance employees say the company scraped Instagram, Snap, and others to make fake accounts on TikTok predecessor Flipagram, later renamed Vigo Video  —  In 2017, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, scraped short-form videos, user names, profile pictures, and profile descriptions from Instagram …

As Russia Plots Its Next Move, an AI Listens to the Chatter

With vast amounts of data becoming available to intelligence analysts, new tools will help them sift and interpret it all—but they will introduce new risks, too.

Huawei promotes CFO Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, as one of three rotating chairs, six months after her detention in Canada (Eva Dou/Washington Post)

Eva Dou / Washington Post: Huawei promotes CFO Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, as one of three rotating chairs, six months after her detention in Canada  —  SHANGHAI — Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has promoted chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou to a key role just half a year …