AgeLab’s Bryan Reimer named to US Department of Transportation innovation committee

AgeLab’s Bryan Reimer named to US Department of Transportation innovation committee

Bryan Reimer, research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics’ (MIT CTL) AgeLab, has been appointed by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT) to the Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee (TTAC). The committee advises the DoT and the secretary of transportation about plans and approaches for transportation innovation.

Reimer, who has been at MIT since 2003, joins a team of 27 experts on the committee chosen to provide diverse perspectives across sectors, geographies, and areas of expertise. Their advice will help ensure that transportation’s future is safe, efficient, sustainable, equitable, and transformative.

A mobility futurist and expert in the human element of assisted and automated vehicle safety, Reimer collaborates with industries worldwide on behavioral, technological, and public policy challenges associated with driver attention, driver assistance systems, automated driving, vulnerable road users, and electric vehicles. These varied interests are reflected in Reimer’s wide-ranging research projects.

He is the founder and co-director of AgeLab’s Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium and Advanced Human Factors Evaluator for Attentional Demand (AHEAD) consortium. AVT launched in 2015 and is a global academic-industry collaboration on developing a data-driven understanding of how drivers respond to commercially available vehicle technologies. The consortium focuses especially on how systems perform and the impacts of technology on driving behavior and consumer attitudes. AHEAD is an academic-industry partnership launched in 2013 that is working to develop a framework for driver attention support and safeguards that can be operationalized.

In 2018, Reimer delivered a TEDx talk entitled “There’s more to safety of driverless cars than AI.” The talk focused on transparency in the deployment and operation of driverless cars and on the “trusted information consumers need” before these automated vehicles become the future of mobility. He believes the public and private sectors must work together to ensure consumers’ safety on public roads.

“Working at the intersection of technology, driver behavior, and public policy for over 20 years, I have long recognized that neither the public or private sectors can solve these complex issues independently,” says Reimer. “A safer, greener, convenient, comfortable, and more economical mobility system will require a deeper collaboration between the public and private sectors. Industries also need appropriate government support and oversight to help them develop, produce, and deploy new technologies that optimize the impact on society. I hope that my work with the committee can highlight needs in this area.”

In a statement, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg remarked on the committee’s mission. “We are living in a time filled with unprecedented opportunity and unprecedented challenges in transportation,” he said. “The deep expertise and diverse perspectives of this impressive group will provide advice to ensure the future of transportation is safe, efficient, sustainable, equitable, and transformative.”

The TTAC is tasked with exploring and considering issues related to:

  • pathways to safe, secure, equitable, environmentally friendly, and accessible deployments of emerging technologies;
  • integrated approaches to promote greater cross-modal integration of emerging technologies, particularly applications to deploy automation;
  • policies that encourage automation to grow and support a safe and productive U.S. workforce, as well as foster economic competitiveness and job quality;
  • approaches and frameworks that encourage the secure exchange and sharing of transformative transportation data, including technologies and infrastructure, across the public and private sectors that can guide core policy decisions across DOT’s strategic goals;
  • ways the DOT can identify and elevate cybersecurity solutions and protect privacy across transportation systems and infrastructure; and
  • other emerging issues, topics, and technologies.

The AgeLab has deep expertise in many of these areas with a multidisciplinary research program that includes home logistics and services and transportation and livable communities topics. It works with businesses, government, and nongovernmental organizations to improve the quality of life of older people and those who care for them. Personal mobility and the availability of delivery systems are critically important elements of this work.

MIT CTL, of which AgeLab is a part, also offers expertise in freight transportation. For example, MIT CTL’s FreightLab has conducted groundbreaking research with industry partners on issues such as truck drivers’ performance, truck transportation availability, and the impact of natural disasters on freight movement.

Transportation research is more critical than ever, given the advance of automation and innovations such as AI-based management systems. Also, there is increasing demand from consumers and governments to make the movement of goods and people more efficient and environmentally friendly.

TTAC members will serve two-year terms and may be reappointed. The committee’s first meeting was held on Jan. 18.

Middle-school students meet a beam of electrons, and excitement results

Want to get middle-school kids excited about science? Let them do their own experiments on MIT.nano’s state-of-the-art microscopes — with guidelines and adult supervision, of course. That was the brainchild of Carl Thrasher and Tao Cai, MIT graduate students who spearheaded the Electron Microscopy Elevating Representation and Growth in Education (EMERGE) program.

Held in November, EMERGE invited 18 eighth-grade students to the pilot event at MIT.nano, an interdisciplinary facility for nanoscale research, to get hands-on experience in microscopy and materials science.

The highlight of the two-hour workshop: Each student explored mystery samples of everyday materials using one of two scanning electron microscopes (SEMs), which scan material samples using a beam of electrons to form an image. Though highly sophisticated, the instruments generated readily understandable data — images of intricate structures in a butterfly wing or a strand of hair, for example.

Middle-school students meet a beam of electrons, and excitement results

A dragonfly leg, seen through a scanning electron microscope. The image was generated by Tyler Flynn, one of the MITES Saturdays middle school students, in a November pilot event called EMERGE (Electron Microscopy Elevating Representation and Growth in Education) at MIT.nano.

Image courtesy of the EMERGE program.


The students had an immediate, tangible sense of success, says Thrasher, from MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). He led the program along with Cai, also from DMSE, and Collette Gordon, a grad student in the Department of Chemistry.

“This experience helped build a sense of agency and autonomy around this area of science, nurturing budding self-confidence among the students,” Thrasher says. “We didn’t give the students instructions, just empowered them to solve problems. When you don’t tell them the solution, you get really surprised with what they come up with.”

Unlocking interest in the infinitesimal

The students were part of a multi-year science and engineering exploration program called MITES Saturdays, run by MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science, or MITES. A team of volunteers was on hand to help students follow the guidance set out by Thrasher, ensuring the careful handling of the SEMs — worth roughly $500,000 each.

MITES Saturdays program administrator Lynsey Ford was thrilled to observe the students’ autonomous exploration and enthusiasm.

“Our students got to meet real scientists who listened to them, cared about the questions they were asking, and welcomed them into a world of science,” Ford says. “A supportive learning environment can be just as powerful for science discovery as a half-million-dollar microscope.”

The pilot workshop was the first step for Thrasher and his team in their goal to build EMERGE into a program with broad impact, engaging middle-to-high school students from a variety of communities.

The partnership with MITES Saturdays is crucial for this endeavor, says Thrasher, providing a platform to reach a wider audience. “Seeing students from diverse backgrounds participating in EMERGE reinforces the profound difference science education can have.”

MITES Saturdays students are high-achieving Massachusetts seventh through 12th graders from Boston, MIT’s hometown of Cambridge, and nearby Lawrence.

“The majority of students who participate in our programs would be the first person in their family to go to college. A lot of them are from families balancing some sort of financial hardship, and from populations that are historically underrepresented in STEM,” Ford says.

Experienced SEM users set up the instruments and prepared test samples so students could take turns exploring specimens such as burrs, butterfly wings, computer chips, hair, and pollen by operating the microscope to adjust magnification, focus, and stage location.

Students left the EMERGE event with copies of the electron microscope images they generated. Thrasher hopes they will use these materials in follow-up projects, ideally integrating them into existing school curricula so students can share their experiences.

EMERGE co-director Cai says students were excited with their experimentation, both in being able to access such high-end equipment and in seeing what materials like Velcro look like under an SEM (spoiler alert: it’s spaghetti).

Middle-school students meet a beam of electrons, and excitement results

A Velcro material sample, magnified using a scanning electron microscope by Ishika Roy, a MITES student in the EMERGE program at MIT.nano, in November.

Image courtesy of the EMERGE program.


“We definitely saw a spark,” Cai says. “The subject matter was complex, but the students always wanted to know more.” And the after-program feedback was positive, with most saying the experience was fun and challenging. The volunteers noted how engaged the students were with the SEMs and subject matter. One volunteer overheard students say, “I felt like a real scientist!”

Inspiring tomorrow’s scientists

EMERGE is based on the Scanning Electron Microscopy Educators program, a long-running STEM outreach program started in 1991 by the Air Force Research Laboratory and adopted by Michigan State University. As an Air Force captain stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Thrasher participated in the program as a volunteer SEM expert.

“I thought it was an incredible opportunity for young students and wanted to bring it here to MIT,” he says.

The pilot was made possible thanks to support from the MITES Saturdays team and the Graduate Materials Council (GMC), the DMSE graduate student organization. Cai and DMSE grad student Jessica Dong, who are both GMC outreach chairs, helped fund, organize, and coordinate the event.

The MITES Saturdays students included reflections on their experience with the SEMs in their final presentations at the MITES Fall Symposium in November.

“My favorite part of the semester was using the SEM as it introduced me to microscopy at the level of electrons,” said one student.

“Our students had an incredible time with the EMERGE team. We’re excited about the possibility of future partnerships with MIT.nano and other departments at MIT, giving our scholars exposure to the breadth of opportunities as future scientists,” says Eboney Hearn, MITES executive director.

With the success of the pilot, the EMERGE team is looking to offer more programs to the MITES students in the spring. Anna Osherov is excited to give students more access to the cumulative staff knowledge and cutting-edge equipment at MIT.nano, which opened in 2018. Osherov is associate director for Characterization.nano, a shared experimental facility for advanced imaging and analysis.

“Our mission is to support mature researchers — and to help inspire the future PhDs and professors who will come to MIT to learn, research, and innovate,” Osherov says. “Designing and offering such programs, aimed at fostering natural curiosity and creativity of young minds, has a tremendous long-term benefit to our society. We can raise tomorrow’s generation in a better way.”

For her part, Ford is still coasting on the students’ excitement. “They come into the program so curious and hungry for knowledge. They remind me every day how amazing the world is.”

Benchtop test quickly identifies extremely impact-resistant materials

An intricate, honeycomb-like structure of struts and beams could withstand a supersonic impact better than a solid slab of the same material. What’s more, the specific structure matters, with some being more resilient to impacts than others.

That’s what MIT engineers are finding in experiments with microscopic metamaterials — materials that are intentionally printed, assembled, or otherwise engineered with microscopic architectures that give the overall material exceptional properties.

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the engineers report on a new way to quickly test an array of metamaterial architectures and their resilience to supersonic impacts.

In their experiments, the team suspended tiny printed metamaterial lattices between microscopic support structures, then fired even tinier particles at the materials, at supersonic speeds. With high-speed cameras, the team then captured images of each impact and its aftermath, with nanosecond precision.

Benchtop test quickly identifies extremely impact-resistant materials
MIT engineers have captured video of a microparticle being fired through a precisely architected metamaterial, measuring thinner than the width of a human hair.

Image: Courtesy of the researchers

Their work has identified a few metamaterial architectures that are more resilient to supersonic impacts compared to their entirely solid, nonarchitected counterparts. The researchers say the results they observed at the microscopic level can be extended to comparable macroscale impacts, to predict how new material structures across length scales will withstand impacts in the real world.

“What we’re learning is, the microstructure of your material matters, even with high-rate deformation,” says study author Carlos Portela, the Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “We want to identify impact-resistant structures that can be made into coatings or panels for spacecraft, vehicles, helmets, and anything that needs to be lightweight and protected.”

Other authors on the study include first author and MIT graduate student Thomas Butruille, and Joshua Crone of DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory.

Pure impact

The team’s new high-velocity experiments build off their previous work, in which the engineers tested the resilience of an ultralight, carbon-based material. That material, which was thinner than the width of a human hair, was made from tiny struts and beams of carbon, which the team printed and placed on a glass slide. They then fired microparticles toward the material, at velocities exceeding the speed of sound.  

Those supersonic experiments revealed that the microstructured material withstood the high-velocity impacts, sometimes deflecting the microparticles and other times capturing them.

“But there were many questions we couldn’t answer because we were testing the materials on a substrate, which may have affected their behavior,” Portela says.

In their new study, the researchers developed a way to test freestanding metamaterials, to observe how the materials withstand impacts purely on their own, without a backing or supporting substrate.

In their current setup, the researchers suspend a metamaterial of interest between two microscopic pillars made from the same base material. Depending on the dimensions of the metamaterial being tested, the researchers calculate how far apart the pillars must be in order to support the material at either end while allowing the material to respond to any impacts, without any influence from the pillars themselves.

“This way, we ensure that we’re measuring the material property and not the structural property,” Portela says.

Once the team settled on the pillar support design, they moved on to test a variety of metamaterial architectures. For each architecture, the researchers first printed the supporting pillars on a small silicon chip, then continued printing the metamaterial as a suspended layer between the pillars.

“We can print and test hundreds of these structures on a single chip,” Portela says.

Punctures and cracks

The team printed suspended metamaterials that resembled intricate honeycomb-like cross-sections. Each material was printed with a specific three-dimensional microscopic architecture, such as a precise scaffold of repeating octets, or more faceted polygons. Each repeated unit measured as small as a red blood cell. The resulting metamaterials were thinner than the width of a human hair.

The researchers then tested each metamaterial’s impact resilience by firing glass microparticles toward the structures, at speeds of up to 900 meters per second (more than 2,000 miles per hour) — well within the supersonic range. They caught each impact on camera and studied the resulting images, frame by frame, to see how the projectiles penetrated each material. Next, they examined the materials under a microscope and compared each impact’s physical aftermath.

“In the architected materials, we saw this morphology of small cylindrical craters after impact,” Portela says. “But in solid materials, we saw a lot of radial cracks and bigger chunks of material that were gouged out.”

Overall, the team observed that the fired particles created small punctures in the latticed metamaterials, and the materials nevertheless stayed intact. In contrast, when the same particles were fired at the same speeds into solid, nonlatticed materials of equal mass, they created large cracks that quickly spread, causing the material to crumble. The microstructured materials, therefore, were more efficient in resisting supersonic impacts as well as protecting against multiple impact events. And in particular, materials that were printed with the repeating octets appeared to be the most hardy.

“At the same velocity, we see the octet architecture is harder to fracture, meaning that the metamaterial, per unit mass, can withstand impacts up to twice as much as the bulk material,” Portela says. “This tells us that there are some architectures that can make a material tougher which can offer better impact protection.”

Going forward, the team plans to use the new rapid testing and analysis method to identify new metamaterial designs, in hopes of tagging architectures that can be scaled up to stronger and lighter protective gear, garments, coatings, and paneling.

“What I’m most excited about is showing we can do a lot of these extreme experiments on a benchtop,” Portela says. “This will significantly accelerate the rate at which we can validate new, high-performing, resilient materials.”

This work was funded, in part, by DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office through the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Blizzard’s New President Is Johanna Faries, A Former Call Of Duty Franchise Manager

Blizzard Entertainment has selected Johanna Faries as its new president following Mike Ybarra’s departure from the studio last week alongside news that Microsoft was laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax teams. Faries worked for the National Football League for 12 years before working at Activision starting in 2018, as reported by Bloomberg. She started as the head of Call of Duty esports before eventually working as a Call of Duty franchise manager at the company Microsoft acquired last year for $69 billion. 

Blizzard’s New President Is Johanna Faries, A Former Call Of Duty Franchise Manager

In Faries’ introductory email to Blizzard employees today, she addressed the layoffs that occurred at the company last week. 

“Though my first official day with you all is February 5, I want to let you know immediately that it is an honor to join you next week in this new capacity,” she writes in the email. “I do so humbly and in awe of all that Blizzard has stood for and delivered to the world for over thirty years. Today also brings some mixed emotions. The loss of talented teammates in recent days is hard to hold side-by-side with the immense excitement I feel about joining Blizzard – and building on the momentum you’ve created for Blizzard’s next chapter.” 

johanna faries new blizzard entertainment president microsoft activision

MIT Sloan

Elsewhere in the email, Faries discusses her history working on Call of Duty and the differences between that franchise and the franchises under Blizzard’s umbrella. “Activision, Blizzard, and King are decidedly different companies with distinct games, cultures, and communities,” she writes. “It is important to note that Call of Duty’s way of waking up in the morning to deliver for players can often differ from the stunning games in Blizzard’s realm: each with different gameplay experiences, communities that surround them, and requisite models of success.” Faries says she’s discussed these differences with the Blizzard leadership team and is stepping into this role “with sensitivity to those dynamics, and deep respect for Blizzard.” 

Faries will be arriving to Blizzard’s Irvine, California-based headquarters next week to informally (and optionally) meet with employees there. In her email, she says she’s a big Diablo IV fan and throughout life, “the joy I find in games – and working with those who make them – only deepens.” 

“I remain inspired by Blizzard’s iconic legacy, and the transformative role gaming has played in my life and in the lives of others,” she writes. “I cannot wait to get going – to listen, to learn, to empower, and to collaborate with all of you on our bold and bright future together. Together, may we forge many legendary days ahead.” 

You can read Faries’ full email here. 

Faries steps into the role of Blizzard’s president following news last week that Mike Ybarra, who had worked at the company since 2019, was leaving. Before Blizzard, Ybarra worked at Microsoft for more than 19 years. 

How do you feel about the future of Blizzard following last week’s layoffs and its new president? Let us know in the comments below!

WWE 2K24 Cover Star Cody Rhodes Shares Zelda Opinions And His Most Anticipated Games Of 2024

This past weekend, I traveled to Tampa/St. Peterburg, FL, to attend WWE’s Royal Rumble and to play WWE 2K24 at a special preview event. You can look for my hands-on impressions and video footage of my gameplay on Thursday, February 1. But while I was there, I had the chance to chat with one of 2K24’s cover stars and the winner of the 2024 Men’s Royal Rumble match, Cody Rhodes.

The “American Nightmare” is a lifelong gamer and professed Zelda fanatic (fun fact: during his early WWE run in ‘07-’08, his wrestling boots sported the Triforce logo). So I decided to forgo any wrestling questions and spent the few precious minutes I had with Cody getting his take on Tears of the Kingdom, how Majora’s Mask stacks up compared to his favorite Zelda game, Ocarina of Time and asked what game he’s most looking forward to playing in 2024. 

Game Informer: I know you’re a big Zelda fan, so I gotta ask: did you play Tears of the Kingdom, and if so, what do you think? 

Cody Rhodes: Yeah, I went right through it. So I feel like Breath of the Wild and Tears of Kingdom are one game because they’re so huge. Like, you don’t ever need to play another Zelda ever again if you’re playing Tears of the Kingdom. I mean, just with the Depths, hunting all the damn Lynels down, and the Lynels just get harder as I get older, which makes me feel like I’m out of touch with gaming itself. But I really liked the story. We wanted more story with Breath of the Wild, we got some of that story with Ganondorf. But they did the right thing in terms of [realizing] “they still want more. Still want more.” And I just think we’re in a kind of golden age of the games that I grew up loving. Metal Gear Solid and Zelda, you’re seeing remakes, you’re seeing remasters, potentially an animated or a live-action movie. To me, I can’t ask for a better thing because we gave all this energy as fans to it, and it can still continue on, you know?

GI: Yeah, for sure. I’m playing Majora’s Mask for the first time for a video feature for my website. Is that a favorite of yours? I know you’re a big Ocarina of Time fan, but where do you land a Majora’s Mask?

Rhodes: So Majora’s Mask is a masterpiece. I get mad at it because people try to say it’s better than Ocarina of Time. I feel like they’re also one game, but Majora’s Mask for what it did with the cycle, the three-day cycle, and things changing with the night and day, there’s still some games in this era who aren’t getting that right. Like, it had a Red Dead-level nuance to it for a Nintendo 64 game. Love Majora’s Mask.

WWE 2K24 Cover Star Cody Rhodes Shares Zelda Opinions And His Most Anticipated Games Of 2024

Myself and Cody (rocking a trademark expensive suit) hang at the WWE 2K24 event. Side note: his loafers were incredible.

GI: I don’t know how much time you have to play games now, but do you have a game that you’re looking forward to coming out this year or anything that you haven’t gotten to in your backlog?

Rhodes: I’ll jump forward and say 2K24 for sure because I’ve only gotten a little bit of a taste of it and have been amazed. But the big one for me is [Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater]. And then, hopefully, I wonder if we’ll get a Metal Gear Collection Volume 2 because I know a lot of people want to see Metal Gear Solid 4 playable on modern consoles. So here’s hoping.

WWE 2K24 launches on March 8 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. 

Study: Smart devices’ ambient light sensors pose imaging privacy risk

Study: Smart devices’ ambient light sensors pose imaging privacy risk

In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” Big Brother watches citizens through two-way, TV-like telescreens to surveil citizens without any cameras. In a similar fashion, our current smart devices contain ambient light sensors, which open the door to a different threat: hackers.

These passive, seemingly innocuous smartphone components receive light from the environment and adjust the screen’s brightness accordingly, like when your phone automatically dims in a bright room. Unlike cameras, though, apps are not required to ask for permission to use these sensors. In a surprising discovery, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) uncovered that ambient light sensors are vulnerable to privacy threats when embedded on a smart device’s screen. The team proposed a computational imaging algorithm to recover an image of the environment from the perspective of the display screen using subtle single-point light intensity changes of these sensors to demonstrate how hackers could use them in tandem with monitors. An open-access paper on this work was published in Science Advances on Jan. 10.

“This work turns your device’s ambient light sensor and screen into a camera! Ambient light sensors are tiny devices deployed in almost all portable devices and screens that surround us in our daily lives,” says Princeton University professor Felix Heide, who was not involved with the paper. “As such, the authors highlight a privacy threat that affects a comprehensive class of devices and has been overlooked so far.”

While phone cameras have previously been exposed as security threats for recording user activity, the MIT group found that ambient light sensors can capture images of users’ touch interactions without a camera. According to their new study, these sensors can eavesdrop on regular gestures, like scrolling, swiping, or sliding, and capture how users interact with their phones while watching videos. For example, apps with native access to your screen, including video players and web browsers, could spy on you to gather this permission-free data.

According to the researchers, a commonly held belief is that ambient light sensors don’t reveal meaningful private information to hackers, so programming apps to request access to them is unnecessary. “Many believe that these sensors should always be turned on,” says lead author Yang Liu, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a CSAIL affiliate. “But much like the telescreen, ambient light sensors can passively capture what we’re doing without our permission, while apps are required to request access to our cameras. Our demonstrations show that when combined with a display screen, these sensors could pose some sort of imaging privacy threat by providing that information to hackers monitoring your smart devices.”

Collecting these images requires a dedicated inversion process where the ambient light sensor first collects low-bitrate variations in light intensity, partially blocked by the hand making contact with the screen. Next, the outputs are mapped into a two-dimensional space by forming an inverse problem with the knowledge of the screen content. An algorithm then reconstructs the picture from the screen’s perspective, which is iteratively optimized and denoised via deep learning to reveal a pixelated image of hand activity.

The study introduces a novel combination of passive sensors and active monitors to reveal a previously unexplored imaging threat that could expose the environment in front of the screen to hackers processing the sensor data from another device. “This imaging privacy threat has never been demonstrated before,” says Liu, who worked alongside Frédo Durand on the paper, who is an MIT EECS professor, CSAIL member, and senior author of the paper.

The team suggested two software mitigation measures for operating system providers: tightening up permissions and reducing the precision and speed of the sensors. First, they recommend restricting access to the ambient light sensor by allowing users to approve or deny those requests from apps. To further prevent any privacy threats, the team also proposed limiting the capabilities of the sensors. By reducing the precision and speed of these components, the sensors would reveal less private information. From the hardware side, the ambient light sensor should not be directly facing the user on any smart device, they argued, but instead placed on the side, where it won’t capture any significant touch interactions.

Getting the picture

The inversion process was applied to three demonstrations using an Android tablet. In the first test, the researchers seated a mannequin in front of the device, while different hands made contact with the screen. A human hand pointed to the screen, and later, a cardboard cutout resembling an open-hand gesture touched the monitor, with the pixelated imprints gathered by the MIT team revealing the physical interactions with the screen.

A subsequent demo with human hands revealed that the way users slide, scroll, pinch, swipe, and rotate could be gradually captured by hackers through the same imaging method, although only at a speed of one frame every 3.3 minutes. With a faster ambient light sensor, malicious actors could potentially eavesdrop on user interactions with their devices in real time.

In a third demo, the group found that users are also at risk when watching videos like films and short clips. A human hand hovered in front of the sensor while scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons played on screen, with a white board behind the user reflecting light to the device. The ambient light sensor captured the subtle intensity changes for each video frame, with the resulting images exposing touch gestures.

While the vulnerabilities in ambient light sensors pose a threat, such a hack is still restricted. The speed of this privacy issue is low, with the current image retrieval rate being 3.3 minutes per frame, which overwhelms the dwell of user interactions. Additionally, these pictures are still a bit blurry if retrieved from a natural video, potentially leading to future research. While telescreens can capture objects away from the screen, this imaging privacy issue is only confirmed for objects that make contact with a mobile device’s screen, much like how selfie cameras cannot capture objects out of frame.

Two other EECS professors are also authors on the paper: CSAIL member William T. Freeman and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab member Gregory Wornell, who leads the Signals, Information, and Algorithms Laboratory in the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Their work was supported, in part, by the DARPA REVEAL program and an MIT Stata Family Presidential Fellowship.

Astronomers spot 18 black holes gobbling up nearby stars

Astronomers spot 18 black holes gobbling up nearby stars

Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by MIT scientists, appearing today in the Astrophysical Journal.

The study’s authors are reporting the discovery of 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs) — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. As the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Astronomers have detected previous tidal disruption events by looking for characteristic bursts in the optical and X-ray bands. To date, these searches have revealed about a dozen star-shredding events in the nearby universe. The MIT team’s new TDEs more than double the catalog of known TDEs in the universe.

The researchers spotted these previously “hidden” events by looking in an unconventional band: infrared. In addition to giving off optical and X-ray bursts, TDEs can generate infrared radiation, particularly in “dusty” galaxies, where a central black hole is enshrouded with galactic debris. The dust in these galaxies normally absorbs and obscures optical and X-ray light, and any sign of TDEs in these bands. In the process, the dust also heats up, producing infrared radiation that is detectable. The team found that infrared emissions, therefore, can serve as a sign of tidal disruption events.

By looking in the infrared band, the MIT team picked out many more TDEs, in galaxies where such events were previously hidden. The 18 new events occurred in different types of galaxies, scattered across the sky.

“The majority of these sources don’t show up in optical bands,” says lead author Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “If you want to understand TDEs as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”

Other MIT authors include Kishalay De, Christos Panagiotou, Anna-Christina Eilers, Danielle Frostig, and Robert Simcoe, and MIT assistant professor of physics Erin Kara, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Heat spike

The team recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations. The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.

That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs. For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NEOWISE — the renewed version of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This satellite telescope launched in 2009 and after a brief hiatus has continued to scan the entire sky for infrared “transients,” or brief bursts.

The team looked through the mission’s archived observations using an algorithm developed by co-author Kishalay De. This algorithm picks out patterns in infrared emissions that are likely signs of a transient burst of infrared radiation. The team then cross-referenced the flagged transients with a catalog of all known nearby galaxies within 200 megaparsecs, or 600 million light years. They found that infrared transients could be traced to about 1,000 galaxies.

They then zoomed in on the signal of each galaxy’s infrared burst to determine whether the signal arose from a source other than a TDE, such as an active galactic nucleus or a supernova. After ruling out these possibilities, the team then analyzed the remaining signals, looking for an infrared pattern that is characteristic of a TDE — namely, a sharp spike followed by a gradual dip, reflecting a process by which a black hole, in ripping apart a star, suddenly heats up the surrounding dust to about 1,000 kelvins before gradually cooling down.

This analysis revealed 18 “clean” signals of tidal disruption events. The researchers took a survey of the galaxies in which each TDE was found, and saw that they occurred in a range of systems, including dusty galaxies, across the entire sky.

“If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them,” Masteron says. “It’s not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches.”

“It is now possible to peer through the dust and complete the census of nearby TDEs,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, who was not involved with the study. “A particularly exciting aspect of this work is the potential of follow-up studies with large infrared surveys, and I’m excited to see what discoveries they will yield.”

A dusty solution

The team’s discoveries help to resolve some major questions in the study of tidal disruption events. For instance, prior to this work, astronomers had mostly seen TDEs in one type of galaxy — a “post-starburst” system that had previously been a star-forming factory, but has since settled. This galaxy type is rare, and astronomers were puzzled as to why TDEs seemed to be popping up only in these rarer systems. It so happens that these systems are also relatively devoid of dust, making a TDE’s optical or X-ray emissions naturally easier to detect.

Now, by looking in the infrared band, astronomers are able to see TDEs in many more galaxies. The team’s new results show that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not only post-starburst systems.

The findings also resolve a “missing energy” problem. Physicists have theoreticially predicted that TDEs should radiate more energy than what has been actually observed. But the MIT team now say that dust may explain the discrepancy. They found that if a TDE occurs in a dusty galaxy, the dust itself could absorb not only optical and X-ray emissions but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, in an amount equivalent to the presumed “missing energy.”

The 18 new detections also are helping astronomers estimate the rate at which TDEs occur in a given galaxy. When they figure the new TDEs in with previous detections, they estimate a galaxy experiences a tidal disruption event once every 50,000 years. This rate comes closer to physicists’ theoretical predictions. With more infrared observations, the team hopes to resolve the rate of TDEs, and the properties of the black holes that power them.

“People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them,” Kara says. “This gives us confidence that we don’t need all this exotic physics to explain what we’re seeing. And we have a better handle on the mechanics behind how a star gets ripped apart and gobbled up by a black hole. We’re understanding these systems better.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

Embracer Group Cancels New Deus Ex Game In Development At Eidos-Montréal, Lays Off 97 Employees

Embracer Group Cancels New Deus Ex Game In Development At Eidos-Montréal, Lays Off 97 Employees

Embracer Group has canceled a new Deus Ex game in development at Eidos-Montréal, according to a new Bloomberg report. Alongside this cancelation, Eidos-Montréal, which is the studio behind 2021’s Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and both Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, has revealed it is laying off 97 employees. 

Bloomberg reports that Eidos-Montréal had been working on this new unannounced Deus Ex game for two years, and it was set to enter production later this year, according to sources familiar with the studio. It seems the studio’s canceled game and subsequent layoffs are another casualty of Embracer, which has been purging studios after a planned $2 billion deal with Saudi Arabia-backed Savvy Games Group fell through last year. 

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Eidos-Montréal has not addressed the canceled Deus Ex game, and it’s unlikely it will. However, the studio posted the following statement today regarding the 97 people laid off there. 

“For the last 17 years, our teams at Eidos have worked on some of the most beloved brands in the industry, combining deep storytelling and innovation into unique games. We have created memorable multi-awarded experiences that we are proud of and we know our team members have put their heart and soul in all of them. 

“The global economic context, the challenges of our industry, and the comprehensive restructuring announced by Embracer have finally impacted our studio. The difficult decision has been made to let go 97 people from development teams, administration, and support services.

“We are working to support all impacted personnel through this transition. These very talented, highly experienced people are entering the employment market, and we want them to find their next projects and are helping to do so.

“As we navigate these difficult times, the well-being of our team is our priority and the continuous commitment to creating games that players will be able to enjoy in the nearby future. 

“To our players… it’s often times not just the games but the game makers as well that we celebrate and admire. Our commitment is always to making the best games for our amazing fans and even with this restructuring change, we continue to fight on to deliver those awesome experiences for us to share together. Thank you for your continuing support and well wishes.” 

These job cuts join a string of other disheartening 2024 layoffs, which total more than 5,500 in just the first 29 days of the year. Destroy All Humans remake developer Black Forest Games reportedly laid off 50 employees last week, and Microsoft announced it was laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax teams last week as well. Outriders studio People Can Fly laid off more than 30 employees last week, and League of Legends company Riot Games laid off 530 employees. 

We recently learned Lords of the Fallen Publisher CI Games was laying off 10 percent of its staff, that Unity would be laying off 1,800 people by the end of March, and that Twitch had laid off 500 employees. 

We also learned that Discord had laid off 170 employees, that layoffs happened at PTW, a support studio that’s worked with companies like Blizzard and Capcom, and that SteamWorld Build company, Thunderful Group, let go of roughly 100 people. Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive also reportedly laid off 45 people, too. 

Last year, more than 10,000 people in the games industry or game-adjacent industries were laid off. 

In January of last year, Microsoft laid off 10,000 employees amidst its ongoing $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which it completed in October. 

Striking Distance Studios, the team behind 2022’s The Callisto Protocol, laid off more than 30 employees in August of 2023. That same month, Mass Effect and Dragon Age developer BioWare laid off 50 employees, including long-time studio veterans. The following month, in September, Immortals of Aveum developer Ascendant Studios laid off roughly 45% of its staff, and Fortnite developer Epic Games laid off 830 employees. 

In October of last year, The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog laid off at least 25 employees, and Telltale Games also underwent layoffs, although an actual number of affected employees has not yet been revealed. Dreams developer Media Molecule laid off 20 employees in late October.

In November, Amazon Games laid off 180 staff members, Ubisoft laid off more than 100 employees, Bungie laid off roughly 100 developers, and 505 Games’ parent company, Digital Bros, laid off 30% of its staff. 

In December, Embracer Group closed its reformed TimeSplitters studio, Free Radical Design, and earlier in the year, Embracer closed Saints Row developer Volition Games, a studio with more than 30 years of development history. A few weeks before the winter holidays, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering owner Hasbro laid off 1,100 employees. 

The games industry will surely feel the effects of such horrific layoffs for years to come. The hearts of the Game Informer staff are with everyone who’s been affected by layoffs or closures.

[Source: Bloomberg]

Financial services introducing AI but hindered by data issues

According to research by EXL, around 89 percent of insurance and banking firms in the UK have introduced AI solutions over the past year. However, issues with data optimisation could hinder their impact. The researchers surveyed executives at top UK insurers and lenders about their AI…