MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
July 6, 2017
MIT News: top stories
A weekly digest of the Institute’s research and innovation

Peering into neural networks

New technique helps elucidate the inner workings of neural networks trained on visual data.

Investigating the trap of unemployment

PhD student Aicha Ben Dhia studies France’s labor market from the perspective of local job-seekers.

Researchers use Kinect to scan T. rex skull

System with $150 worth of hardware offers alternative to 3-D scanners that cost 200 times as much.

Tiny “motors” are driven by light

Researchers demonstrate nanoscale particles that ordinary light sources can set spinning.

Bolstering public support for state-level renewable energy policies

Analysis shows the design and framing of renewable energy policies can strengthen public support — or opposition.

Practical parallelism

System enables large speedups — as much as 88-fold — on common parallel-computing algorithms.

In the Media

MIT researchers have designed a drone that can stay aloft for several days and could serve as an airborne telecommunications hub for disaster zones, reports Katherine Lin for NBC News. Prof. Warren Hoburg explains that the aircraft has a, “five-day endurance that is sized to carry a 10-pound payload at 15,000 feet.”

MIT researchers have developed a light-based computing system that could enhance deep learning, reports Jesse Dunietz for Scientific American. Future versions fabricated for deep learning, “could provide the same accuracy as the best conventional chips while slashing the energy consumption by orders of magnitude and offering 100 times the speed.”

New Scientist reporter Evelyn Wang writes that a study by MIT researchers finds that, “the question of whether a scrambled Rubik’s cube of any size can be solved in a given number of moves is what’s called NP-complete – that’s maths lingo for a problem even mathematicians find hard to solve.”

MIT researchers have developed a laser sensing technique that can decipher the makeup of space debris orbiting around Earth, reports Alex Kingsbury for The Boston Globe. Knowing what material the debris is made of, “will allow for more precise calculations of momentum, velocity, and the danger they may pose to other objects aloft in orbit,” explains Kingsbury.