Author: Ms. R.

Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural Japan, where many nuclear facilities are located. She remembers worrying about the facilities as a child. Wainwright was only 6 at the time of the Chernobyl accident in 1986, but still recollects it vividly. Those early memories have contributed to Wainwright’s determination to research how technologies can mold environmental resilience……

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QS World University Rankings has placed MIT in the No. 1 spot in 11 subject areas for 2023, the organization announced today. The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research. MIT also placed second in five subject……

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Robert “Bob” Metcalfe ’69, an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, has been awarded the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for his invention of Ethernet. Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of computing,” the award comes with a $1 million prize provided by Google.  Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com Corp., the company that designed, developed, and manufactured computer networking equipment and software, was cited……

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It’s no secret that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has some incredible capabilities — for instance, the chatbot can write poetry that resembles Shakespearean sonnets or debug code for a computer program. These abilities are made possible by the massive machine-learning model that ChatGPT is built upon. Researchers have found that when these types of models become large enough, extraordinary capabilities emerge. But bigger models also require more time and money to train. The training process involves showing hundreds of billions of……

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Three MIT-led teams are among 16 nationwide to receive funding awards to address sustainable materials for global challenges through the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program. Launched in 2019, the program targets solutions to especially compelling societal or scientific challenges at an accelerated pace, by incorporating a multidisciplinary research approach. “Solutions for today’s national-scale societal challenges are hard to solve within a single discipline. Instead, these challenges require convergence to merge ideas, approaches, and technologies from a wide range……

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In the United States, an estimated 15 million tons of textiles end up in landfills or are burned every year. This waste, amounting to 85 percent of the textiles produced in a year, is a growing environmental problem. In 2022, Massachusetts became the first state to enact a law banning the disposal of textiles in the trash, aiming to up recycling percentages. But recycling textiles isn’t always easy. Those that can’t be resold as-is are sent to facilities to……

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“MIT is a place where dreams come true,” says César Terrer, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Here at MIT, Terrer says he’s given the resources needed to explore ideas he finds most exciting, and at the top of his list is climate science. In particular, he is interested in plant-soil interactions, and how the two can mitigate impacts of climate change. In 2022, Terrer received seed grant funding from the Abdul Latif Jameel……

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq. Code-named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by the George W. Bush administration, the goal was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, topple Saddam Hussein, and remake Iraq into a democracy. Two decades later, U.S. troops are still on Iraqi soil and that nation is ravaged by challenges, including a threat of civil war last August. To mark the anniversary, Steven Simon, the Robert E Wilhelm Fellow at the MIT……

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A new research collaboration with The Bahrain Institute for Pearls and Gemstones (DANAT) will seek to develop advanced characterization tools for the analysis of the properties of pearls and to explore technologies to assign unique identifiers to individual pearls. The three-year project will be led by Admir Mašić, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, in collaboration with Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology and professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “Pearls are extremely complex……

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