The star pitcher has been studying aerospace engineering at MIT. Now his pitches will take flight in professional baseball. Like almost any MIT student, Mason Estrada wants to take what he learned on campus and apply it to the working world. Unlike any other current MIT student, Estrada's primary workplace is a pitcher's mound. Estrada, the star pitcher for MIT's baseball team, has signed a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who selected him in the seventh round of the Major League Baseball draft on July 14. The right-hander, whose fastball has reached 96 miles per hour, is taking a leave of absence from the Institute and reported to the Dodgers' instructional camp in Arizona.

America's top minds are apparently putting their all into developing space technology -- but we've gotta admit, we wouldn't really have had this in mind. As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed in a blog post, the Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System (WORMS) modular lunar robot is intended to help NASA and other space agencies build and establish permanent Moon colonies by being able to do a bunch of different types of grunt work. "Robots could potentially do the heavy lifting [on a lunar colony] by laying cables, deploying solar panels, erecting communications towers, and building habitats," the press release reads. "But if each robot is designed for a specific action or task, a moon base could become overrun by a zoo of machines, each with its own unique parts and protocols." WORMS would head off that potential eventuality, MIT notes, by having mix-and-match components that can be traded in and off for whatever task is at hand -- and it's about as weird-looking as one could imagine a mix-and-match lunar robot could look, too.

For entrepreneurial MIT students looking to put their skills to work for a greater good, the Media Arts and Sciences class MAS.664 (AI for Impact) has been a destination point. With the onset of the pandemic, that goal came into even sharper focus. Just weeks before the campus shut down in 2020, a team of students from the class launched a project that would make significant strides toward an open-source platform to identify coronavirus exposures without compromising personal privacy. Their work was at the heart of Safe Paths, one of the earliest contact tracing apps in the United States. The students joined with volunteers from other universities, medical centers, and companies to publish their code, alongside a well-received white paper describing the privacy-preserving, decentralized protocol, all while working with organizations wishing to launch the app within their communities.

In October, the Institute announced the creation of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, an ambitious new enterprise that will allow students to better tailor their educational interests to their goals. But the ideas driving this exciting new effort may carry a distant echo -- especially among alumni were at MIT during the 1980s -- from the time leadership launched another computing enterprise that dramatically changed how undergraduates and graduate students learned. Project Athena was a campus-wide effort to make the tools of computing available to every discipline at the Institute and provide students with systematic access to computers. A new project that featured computer workstations and educational programming, Athena was a milestone in the history of distributed systems and inspired programs like Kerberos. It also revolutionized educational computing for the Institute and beyond, and created the computing environment that many students and faculty still work in today.

Ever heard of "wale [sic] walnut ranch dressing" as a pizza topping? No? That's probably because pizza-making AI made it up. A group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found a way to demonstrate that robots and humans will have a peaceable future -- and they're doing it with pizza. Monday, MIT student Pinar Yanardag and her colleagues launched the "How to Generate (Almost) Anything" project (it's not part of a class). Each week, the group will release something (perfume, art, food) created with an artist or artisan or scientist and a machine working together.

MIT researchers have improved award winning automatic planning software by adding in code that mimics human intuition. The strategies used by high performing human planners were converted into a machine readable form, and then encoded into the automatic planning software. Adding human intuition to the planning software saw an increase in performance between 10 to 15 percent on a challenging set of problems. The research was conducted by scientists at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which is known for a number of cutting edge artificial intelligence breakthroughs. The results from the finding will be presented at an upcoming conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is so last year, according to some experts. Scientists at MIT this week claimed a breakthrough in how human intuition can be added to algorithms. And in a separate, unrelated report, Deloitte Consulting is chastising the business community for not comprehending fully that new, cognitive computing technology should be exploited. "Artificial intelligence is only the beginning," researchers write in a Deloitte University Press article about Deloitte's February study. "Advanced cognitive analytics" is just one of the "fast-evolving" technologies businesses need to get a handle on, they say.

In recent years, the field of academic publishing has ballooned to an estimated 30,000 peer-reviewed journals churning out some 2 million articles per year. While this growth has led to more scientific scholarship, critics argue that it has also spurred increasing numbers of low-quality "predatory publishers" who spam researchers with weekly "calls for papers" and charge steep fees for articles that they often don't even read before accepting. Ten years ago, a few students at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) had noticed such unscrupulous practices, and set out to have some mischievous fun with it. Jeremy Stribling MS '05 PhD '09, Dan Aguayo '01 MEng '02 and Max Krohn PhD '08 spent a week or two between class projects to develop "SCIgen," a program that randomly generates nonsensical computer-science papers, complete with realistic-looking graphs, figures, and citations. SCIgen emerged out of Krohn's previous work as co-founder of the online study guide SparkNotes, which included a generator of high-school essays that was based on "context-free grammar."

Mark 2016 as the year that researchers applied artificial intelligence (AI) to the challenges of cybersecurity. If machines can steer our cars and predict our shopping habits, then why not watch over our networks and servers too? IBM in May 2016 announced Watson for Cyber Security, in which the IT behemoth began teaching its pattern-recognition supercomputer to learn the difference between safe and risky data. That could ease the burden on overworked cybersecurity professionals, IBM hopes. Several universities involved with that project began having students train the system within the past several weeks, explained IBM Watson's Jeb Linton, chief security architect.