Sensors are everywhere today, from our homes and vehicles to medical devices, smart phones, and other useful tech. More and more, sensors help detect our interactions with the environment around us — and shape our understanding of the world. SENSE.nano is an MIT.nano Center of Excellence, with a focus on sensors, sensing systems, and sensing technologies. […] More
Humans are inherently risk-averse: We spend our days calculating routes and routines, taking precautionary measures to avoid disease, danger, and despair. Still, our measures for controlling the inner workings of our biology can be a little more unruly. With that in mind, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up […] More
A novel system developed by MIT researchers automatically “learns” how to schedule data-processing operations across thousands of servers — a task traditionally reserved for imprecise, human-designed algorithms. Doing so could help today’s power-hungry data centers run far more efficiently. Data centers can contain tens of thousands of servers, which constantly run data-processing tasks from developers […] More
Stock market investors often rely on financial risk theories that help them maximize returns while minimizing financial loss due to market fluctuations. These theories help investors maintain a balanced portfolio to ensure they’ll never lose more money than they’re willing to part with at any given time. Inspired by those theories, MIT researchers in collaboration […] More
When Tracy Slatyer faced a crisis of confidence early in her educational career, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and a certain fictional janitor at MIT helped to bolster her resolve. Slatyer was 11 when her family moved from Canberra, Australia, to the island nation of Fiji. It was a three-year stay, as part […] More
Amid rollbacks of the Clean Power Plan and other environmental regulations at the federal level, several U.S. states, cities, and towns have resolved to take matters into their own hands and implement policies to promote renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One popular approach, now in effect in 29 states and the District of […] More
The MIT Press has announced the release of a comprehensive report on the current state of all available open-source software for publishing. “Mind the Gap,” funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “shed[s] light on the development and deployment of open source publishing technologies in order to aid institutions’ and individuals’ decision-making […] More
Improved air quality can be a major bonus of climate mitigation policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By cutting air pollution levels in the country where emissions are produced, such policies can avoid significant numbers of premature deaths. But other nations downwind from the host country may also benefit. A new MIT study in […] More
