MIT Media Lab

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

Interested in applying to the Media Lab? Applications to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) are due by 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.

Media Lab Professor Mitch Resnick talks to Edutopia - George Lucas Educational Foundation about his research group’s approach to playful learning with technology—including Scratch and OctoStudio, both of which were developed in the Lifelong Kindergarten group. “I sometimes say rather than trying to minimize screen time, people should try to maximize creativity time,” Professor Resnick says. “That creativity time could be making origami or building with Lego or painting with watercolors—or it could be making a Scratch project or an OctoStudio project.”

AstroAnt was the Robotics + Automation category winner for Tech Briefs' 2024 Create the Future Design Contest. Developed by the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group and Space Exploration Initiative, with support from Castrol, the AstroAnt is a miniature robot designed to perform inspections and diagnostic tasks on the external surfaces of spacecraft, rovers, and landers.

The Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, opening in February 2025, will house MIT's new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program. The program, whose faculty members include Media Lab alumni Anna Huang and Eran Egozy, will invite students to explore the intersections between music, computing, and tech. It’s a collaborative academic program between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS); Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT EECS) in the MIT School of Engineering; and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Congratulations to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees, including Media Lab Professor Paul Liang, head of the Multisensory Intelligence research group; Naroa Coretti Sánchez, a PhD student in the City Science research group; and Zoë Bentley, Accessibility Lead for the Lifelong Kindergarten group and one of the creators of the group's OctoStudio app! #ForbesUnder30

Tune in at 12pm ET on Friday, December 13 for the next session of “Thinking with Sand: A Talk Series Exploring New Software Tools for Creative Exploration and Augmented Thinking,” featuring designer, anthropologist, and developer Maggie Appleton! Hosted by the Media Lab’s Future Sketches group, this series will feature artists and researchers working with new interfaces and tools for augmented thinking and creative exploration. Free, virtual, + open to the public.

Language models like ChatGPT are reshaping how we interact with AI, but are they truly unbiased? A new study from the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (MIT CCC) reveals that even reward models — designed to align AI outputs with human preferences or objective truths — can exhibit political bias. Led by Suyash Fulay (PhD candidate), Jad Kabbara (Research Scientist), and Deb Roy (Director), a team of MIT CCC researchers found that left-leaning bias persists, even when models are trained solely on factual data. This raises crucial questions about achieving both truthfulness and political neutrality in AI. Their findings, presented at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing last month, underscore the need to investigate and address bias in generative AI, especially as it becomes more integrated into society. Learn more in this MIT News article: https://lnkd.in/eiJrH_gm Conference paper:  https://lnkd.in/ej6JUWfE #AIResearch #MITNews #MIT #PoliticalBias #GenerativeAI #MITCCC  MIT Media Lab Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In The New Yorker, Rivka Galchen explores the new surgical procedures and bionic technologies being developed by Media Lab Professor Hugh Herr and his colleagues at institutions including MIT, Harvard University, and Brigham and Women's Hospital. These advances are enabling patients to control prosthetic limbs with their own nervous systems. The results, Professor Herr says, are “more than I had expected in my wildest dreams.”

This week, more than two dozen Media Lab professors, students, alumni, and researchers are participating in NeurIPS 2024, the 38th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. The conference, which is being held in a hybrid format (in Vancouver, Canada and online), fosters the exchange of research advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. #NeurIPS2024