AI University

The factors impacting successful patient care are many and varied. Early diagnosis, proper adherence to prescription medication schedules, and effective monitoring and management of chronic disease, for example, all contribute to better outcomes. However, each of these factors can be hindered by outside influences — medication doesn’t work as well if it isn’t taken as prescribed, and disease can be missed or misdiagnosed in early stages if symptoms are mild or not present.Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and a gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), is ...

From Oct. 21 to 22, a delegation of 21 MIT students and one postdoc met in Washington for the 14th Executive Visit Days (ExVD). Organized by the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI) and the MIT Washington Office, ExVD enables students to engage with officials and scientists from federal agencies. Students are given a platform to form connections in the capital while learning about the many facets of science policy work and careers.In two days, the delegation visited eight different agencies. The first day started with meeting the team of the MIT Washington Office. Subsequently, the group held meetings with the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), White House Office of Science and ...

Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius is a tall order. Achieving that goal will not only require a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, but also a substantial reallocation of land to support that effort and sustain the biosphere, including humans. More land will be needed to accommodate a growing demand for bioenergy and nature-based carbon sequestration while ensuring sufficient acreage for food production and ecological sustainability.The expanding role of land in a 1.5 C world will be twofold — to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to produce clean energy. Land-based carbon dioxide removal strategies include bioenergy with carbon c ...

Troy Van Voorhis, the Robert T. Haslam and Bradley Dewey Professor of Chemistry, will step down as department head of the Department of Chemistry at the end of this academic year. Van Voorhis has served as department head since 2019, previously serving the department as associate department head since 2015.“Troy has been an invaluable partner and sounding board who could always be counted on for a wonderful mix of wisdom and pragmatism,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble professor of astrophysics and dean of the MIT School of Science. “While department head, Troy provided calm guidance during the Covid pandemic, encouraging and financially supporting additional progr ...

Whether you’re manufacturing cement, steel, chemicals, or paper, you need a large amount of heat. Almost without exception, manufacturers around the world create that heat by burning fossil fuels.In an effort to clean up the industrial sector, some startups are changing manufacturing processes for specific materials. Some are even changing the materials themselves. Daniel Stack SM ’17, PhD ’21 is trying to address industrial emissions across the board by replacing the heat source.Since coming to MIT in 2014, Stack has worked to develop thermal batteries that use electricity to heat up a conductive version of ceramic firebricks, which have been used as heat stores and insulators for centu ...

The MIT Press has released a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem.The report, entitled “Access to Science and Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held at the Washington headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sept. 20.While open access aims to democratize knowledge, its implementation has been a factor in the consolidation of the academic publishing industry, an explosion in published articles with inconsistent review a ...

Captivated as a child by video games and puzzles, Marzyeh Ghassemi was also fascinated at an early age in health. Luckily, she found a path where she could combine the two interests. “Although I had considered a career in health care, the pull of computer science and engineering was stronger,” says Ghassemi, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). “When I found that computer science broadly, and AI/ML specifically, could be applied to health care, it was a convergence of interests.”Today, G ...

Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapies can be very effective against some cancers by helping the immune system recognize cancer cells that are masquerading as healthy cells. T cells are built to recognize specific pathogens or cancer cells, which they identify from the short fragments of proteins presented on their surface. These fragments are often referred to as antigens. Healthy cells will will not have the same short fragments or antigens on their surface, and thus will be spared from attack. Even with cancer-associated antigens studding their surfaces, tumor cells can still escape attack by presenting a checkpoint protein, which is built to turn off the T cell. Immune c ...

Filter feeders are everywhere in the animal world, from tiny crustaceans and certain types of coral and krill, to various molluscs, barnacles, and even massive basking sharks and baleen whales. Now, MIT engineers have found that one filter feeder has evolved to sift food in ways that could improve the design of industrial water filters.In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team characterizes the filter-feeding mechanism of the mobula ray — a family of aquatic rays that includes two manta species and seven devil rays. Mobula rays feed by swimming open-mouthed through plankton-rich regions of the ocean and filtering plankton particles i ...

James Wesley “Jim” Harris PhD ’67, professor emeritus of Spanish and linguistics, passed away on Nov. 10. He was 92.Harris attended the University of Georgia, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He later earned a master’s degree in linguistics from Louisiana State University and a PhD in linguistics from MIT.Harris joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. During his tenure, he served as head of what was then called the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.“I met Jim when I came to MIT in 1977 as department head of the neonatal Department ...