MIT News Office

September 15, 2011 • 8:37 am 1

Printing off the paper

by David L. Chandler

Imagine being able to “print” an entire house. Or a four-course dinner. Or a complete mechanical device such as a cuckoo clock, fully assembled and ready to run. Or a printer capable of printing … yet another printer?

These are no longer sci-fi flights of fancy. Rather, they are all real (though very early-stage) research projects underway at MIT, and just a few ways the Institute is pushing forward the boundaries of a technology it helped pioneer nearly two decades ago. A flurry of media stories this year have touted three-dimensional printing — or “3DP” — as the vanguard of a revolution in the way goods are produced, one that could potentially usher in a new era of “mass customization.”

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Filed under: General technology, Hardware, Preview, 3D printing, 3DP, Assistant Professor, Business, David L. Chandler, Doctor of Philosophy, how 3D printing works, http://technology-headlines.com, inkjet printer, Mass production, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mechanical device, Media Arts, metal casting, MIT Media Lab, MIT News Office, Neri Oxman, PhD, practical 3-D printer, print, Printing better materials, Roman Empire, Solar cell, technology headlines

August 22, 2011 • 9:29 am 0

Simple security for wireless

Researchers demonstrate the first wireless security scheme that can protect against “man-in-the-middle” attacks — but doesn’t require a password.

By Larry Hardesty

MIT News Office

In early August, at the Def Con conference — a major annual gathering of computer hackers — someone apparently hacked into many of the attendees’ cell phones, in what may have been the first successful breach of a 4G cellular network. If early reports are correct, the incident was a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, so called because the attacker interposes himself between two other wireless devices.

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Filed under: General technology, Associate Professor, cell phones, Computer Science and Engineering, cryptographic keys, Data Communications, Def Con, DefCon, encryption key, Federal Communications Commission, Government Accountability Office, http://technology-headlines.com, Larry Hardesty, Man-in-the-middle attack, MIT News Office, MITM attack, Mobile phone, Security, Simple security for wireless, technology headlines, Usenix Security symposium, Wi-Fi, WiFi routers, Wireless, wireless devices

July 21, 2011 • 10:04 am 0

Inside the innards of a nuclear reactor

By Jennifer Chu

As workers continue to grapple with the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan, the crisis has shone a spotlight on nuclear reactors around the world. In June, The Associated Press released results from a yearlong investigation, revealing evidence of “unrelenting wear” in many of the oldest-running facilities in the United States.

Tiny robots may monitor underground pipes for radioactive leaks.

That study found that three-quarters of the country’s nuclear reactor sites have leaked radioactive tritium from buried piping that transports water to cool reactor vessels, often contaminating groundwater. According to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the industry has limited methods to monitor underground pipes for leaks.

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Filed under: General technology, Associated Press, AUVs, Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Energy, Georgia Institue of Technology Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Information Systems and Technology, Japan, MIT news, MIT News Office, Nuclear, nuclear reactor, Nuclear reactor technology, technology, The Associated Press, U.S. Goverment Accountability Office, United States

July 15, 2011 • 11:11 am 1

Computer learns language by playing games

by Larry Hardesty

MIT News Office

Computers are great at treating words as data: Word-processing programs let you rearrange and format text however you like, and search engines can quickly find a word anywhere on the Web. But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin?

One test might be whether the computer could analyze and follow a set of instructions for an unfamiliar task. And indeed, in the last few years, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have begun designing machine-learning systems that do exactly that, with surprisingly good results.

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Filed under: General technology, Artificial intelligence, Association for Computational Linguistics, Brown University, Characters of Beverly Hills 90210, civilization, Communications, computer science and antificial inteligence laboratory, Computers, David Silver, electrical engineering and electronics, Eugene Charniak, Games, http://technology-headlines.com, language, Larry Hardesty, machine learning, machine-learning algorithm, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mit, MIT news, MIT News Office, Sid Meier's, Sid Meier's Civilization V, strategy game, Technolgy Headlines, University College London, Video Games

Technology-Headlines

Printing off the paper

Simple security for wireless

Researchers demonstrate the first wireless security scheme that can protect against “man-in-the-middle” attacks — but doesn’t require a password.

Inside the innards of a nuclear reactor

By Jennifer Chu

MIT News Office

Tiny robots may monitor underground pipes for radioactive leaks.

Computer learns language by playing games

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