Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter spotlights various MIT research efforts aimed at ensuring that AI is used to empower human workers rather than replace them. Prof. David Autor notes: “AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Stuart Madnick explains the growing risk of cybersecurity attacks and how to address them. “In many cases, companies fall victim to these attacks because they aren’t aware of the risks that they are taking, such as not confirming the quality of a vendor’s security or monitoring whether their outgoing data traffic is being transferred to improper destinations,” writes Madnick. “Organizations can, and must, do these things better to stop the continued rise in data breaches.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, and Jeffrey Proudfoot, a research affiliate with Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, make the case that while board members are increasingly being tasked with a company’s cybersecurity strategy, they are often not prepared to deal with attacks. “With the increasing mandate on boards to serve as the strategic cybersecurity guards of their companies, more needs to be done to guard the guards themselves,” they write.
Radia – a startup founded by Mark Lundstrom '91, SM '93, MBA '93 – has unveiled the “WindRunner,” a large cargo plane equipped with wind turbine blades aimed at transforming wind energy across the United States, reports Jennifer Hiller and Brian McGill for The Washington Post. “Radia estimates the larger turbines could reduce the cost of energy by up to 35% and increase the consistency of power generation by 20% compared with today’s onshore turbines,” they write.
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that high exposure to implausible and outlandish false claims can increase the belief in more ambiguous-seeming ones, reports Chris Stokel-Walker for Scientific American. The researchers “conducted five experiments with nearly 5,500 participants in all in which they asked these individuals to read or evaluate news headlines,” writes Stokel-Walker. “Across all the experiments, participants exposed to blatantly false claims were more likely to believe unrelated, more ambiguous falsehoods.”
MIT’s new Climate Policy Center, directed by Prof. Christopher Knittel, will aim to produce “policy-relevant research on shorter timescales, while also pursuing more typical, long-term peer-reviewed work,” reports Andrew Freeman for Axios.
Prof. Arnold Barnett speaks with NPR reporter Juliana Kim about airline safety and the risks associated with flying. According to Barnett, "from 2018 to 2022, the chances of a passenger being killed on a flight anywhere in the world was 1 in 13.4 million. Between 1968 to 1977, the chance was 1 in 350,000,” writes Kim.
Prof. Thomas Malone speaks with Poets & Quants for Executives reporter Alison Damast about the executive education course he teaches with Prof. Daniela Rus that aims to provide senior-level managers with a better sense of how AI works. “We are certainly not trying to teach people to understand the details of how to write AI programs, though some of those in the course may know that already,” Malone says. “What we are trying to do is give them a sense of when it is easy and when it is hard to use AI technology at various times for different kinds of business applications.”
Gabriel Klein MBA '18 – senior director at EY-Parthenon, and a “beloved husband, son, brother, friend and colleague” – has died at the age of 35, reports Jeremy C. Fox for The Boston Globe. “He taught me what it meant to be a good person, to be a mensch,” says Gabriel’s brother, Noah Klein. “He taught me that you have to always be a loyal friend, and you always have to be a good son, and that means putting other people in front of yourself.”
Prof. Edward Roberts, one of the area’s “most influential pioneers in entrepreneurship” known for his work “encouraging startups and increasing MIT’s role in the tech industry ecosystem,” has died at 88, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “There’s this narrative that you’re born to be an entrepreneur, and he did this research and debunked that,” explains Prof. Bill Aulet. “It’s impossible to go into entrepreneurship, especially in Boston, but even globally, without finding his influences.”
Senior Lecturer Luis Videgaray speaks with Government Technology reporter Nikki Davidson about concerns facing emerging AI programs and initiatives. Videgaray underscores the importance of finding vendors, "who are willing to protect the data in a way that is appropriate and also provides the state or local government agency with the required degree of transparency about the workings of the model, the data that was used for training and how that data will interact with the data supplied by the customer.”
A new study by Prof. Joseph Weber and his colleagues “attempts to understand how financial statement auditors detect, resolve, and deal with the aftermath of material misstatements (MMs) in companies’ financial statements,” reports Joseph Brazel for Forbes.
Boston Globe reporter Michael Silverman spotlights the 18th MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference focused on a, “diverse array of heady topics such as artificial intelligence, the globalization of soccer, the next phase of sports ownership, the evolutional of poker strategy,” writes Silverman, noting that “nearly every conversation on stage seemed to circle back to a shared belief that the momentum already carrying women’s sports is on the verge of a new surge.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Kristin Forbes delves into her new study examining how quantitative tightening (QT) programs impact markets. “QT programs have, so far, been working as central banks intended,” Forbes writes. “At the same time, they have provided a small degree of support for central banks’ efforts to tighten financial conditions, with minimal impact on market functioning and liquidity. QT has worked in the opposite direction to quantitative easing, but the effects are much, much more muted.”
Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with CNBC reporter Kevin Williams about how the rise of generative AI technologies could lead to cyberattacks on physical infrastructure. “If you cause a power plant to stop from a typical cyberattack, it will be back up and online pretty quickly,” Madnick explains, “but if hackers cause it to explode or burn down, you are not back online a day or two later; it will be weeks and months because a lot of the parts in these specialized systems are custom made.”