Uncertainty about the course of the Covid-19 pandemic continues, with more than 2,500,000 known cases and 126,000 deaths in the United States alone. How to contain the virus, limit its damage, and address the deep-rooted health and racial inequalities it has exposed are now urgent topics for policymakers. Earlier this spring, 300 data scientists and […] More
Ali Jadbabaie, the JR East Professor of Engineering, has been named the new head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), effective Sept. 1. “Ali’s work has crossed disciplines and departments and led to multi-university collaborations,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical […] More
On Nov. 21, 2019, the sun had set just a couple of hours before on an unseasonably warm day, and Jacqueline Thomas PhD ’20 found herself sitting on the edge of her seat in a typical meeting room in the William J. Hughes Technical Center, part of the Federal Aviation Administration, in Atlantic City, New […] More
On a typical day in our data-saturated world, Facebook announces plans to encrypt its Messenger data, prompting uproar from child welfare activists who fear privacy will come at the cost of online safety. A new company called Tillable, an AirBnB for farmers, makes headlines for allowing the public to rent farmland while collecting and tracking […] More
The fast and efficient generation of random numbers has long been an important challenge. For centuries, games of chance have relied on the roll of a die, the flip of a coin, or the shuffling of cards to bring some randomness into the proceedings. In the second half of the 20th century, computers started taking […] More
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to challenge how societies and institutions function at macro and micro scales. In the United States, the novel coronavirus has affected everything from the economy to elections — and has raised difficult questions about MIT’s capacity to reopen in the fall. To help policymakers at MIT and beyond make informed decisions, […] More
What do radiation waves from space, the U.S. Census, and the human genome have in common? All three, like so many things today, involve massive amounts of data. These data can unlock insights and lead to new solutions and better decision-making — for those who have the knowledge and tools to analyze it. The impressive variety […] More
The Covid-19 pandemic is generating waves of data points from around the world, recording the number of tests performed, cases confirmed, patients recovered, and people who have died from the virus. As these data are continuously updated, media outlets, government agencies, academics, and data-packaging firms are racing to make sense of the numbers, using novel […] More
