MIT Media Lab

The TED Radio Hour explores advances in tech that may enhance human capabilities, including work from the Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group and the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT.

More than 50,000 people participated in this year’s Cambridge Science Festival, a week-long celebration of creativity, ingenuity, and innovation hosted by the MIT Museum! The Media Lab was thrilled to be part of this amazing program. MIT News has more about all of the events: https://lnkd.in/gkX-RvbU

Interested in applying to the Media Lab? Applications to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) are open through December 15, 2024! All MAS students begin at the master's level and can then apply to the PhD program during their second year of study.

On CNN’s Tomorrow Transformed, Professor Canan Dagdeviren talks about her work developing wearable ultrasound scanners that could be used for early detection of breast cancer, and how it inspired her students in the Conformable Decoders group to create small silicone patches that can scan for cancers and other health conditions elsewhere in the body.

Little Language Models, developed by Media Lab PhD students Manuj Dhariwal and Shruti Dhariwal, helps kids learn how AI models work by giving them tools to build small-scale versions of their own. It starts with a pair of virtual dice, used to demonstrate probabilistic thinking, and proceeds through more advanced concepts like Markov chains, where the probability of a future event depends on the variables that come before it. Little Language Models, which is being trialed in schools over the next month, runs inside coco.build—a learning platform, also developed by the Dhariwals, that empowers educators to engage students in creative computing experiences with peers.

Pop balloons and set a new high score with Eric's latest #OctoStudio tutorial 🎈🎉 Watch here: https://lnkd.in/exBiCVpr

Research from the Media Lab's Conformable Decoders group, “Design Approaches and Electromechanical Modeling of Conformable Piezoelectric-Based Ultrasound Systems,” has been featured on the cover of Advanced Sensor Research (Wiley), for its October 2024 issue. https://lnkd.in/gHc_zBtM

Congratulations to all of the honorees in the 2024 MIT Prize for Open Data, including Lily Chen, a master’s student in the Media Lab’s Multisensory Intelligence group, and Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn, a recent graduate of the Fluid Interfaces group! This prize is co-sponsored by the MIT School of Science and MIT Libraries.

The October edition of the MIT Media Lab's LinkedIn newsletter is available now!

In 2015, Professor Ed Boyden’s Synthetic Neurobiology group invented expansion microscopy, a technique that allows researchers to expand biological samples and make them easier to image at higher resolutions. In a new study published in Nature Methods, Professor Boyden and collaborators demonstrate a new expansion microscopy protocol that expands samples up to 20 times in a single step—letting researchers obtain images at a resolution of about 20 nanometers, using a conventional light microscope. “Twenty-fold expansion gets you into the realm that biological molecules operate in,” Professor Boyden explains. “The building blocks of life are nanoscale things: biomolecules, genes, and gene products.” Laura Kiessling, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and MIT’s MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, says, “This democratizes imaging. Without this method, if you want to see things with a high resolution, you have to use very expensive microscopes. What this new technique allows you to do is see things that you couldn’t normally see with standard microscopes. It drives down the cost of imaging because you can see nanoscale things without the need for a specialized facility.” Professor Kiessling and Professor Boyden, who holds a joint appointment in Media Arts and Sciences (the academic program at the Media Lab) and the McGovern Institute at MIT, are the senior authors of the study. MIT graduate student Shiwei Wang and alum Dr. Tay Won Shin are the lead authors. https://lnkd.in/eVd7kdFb