Vijee Venkatraman

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Spyce Boys

In the summer of 2018, a fast-casual restaurant called Spyce opened in Boston’s Downtown Crossing. Its unique selling point: the food was made by robots. The futuristic front-end, whose workings are visible through a glass façade, was a clear draw. It provided the wow factor....

The Feather Detective

On 4 October 1960, Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 took off from Logan International Airport on a clear fall evening and plunged almost immediately into the icy waters of Boston Harbor, killing all but ten of the seventy-two people on board. It remains the deadliest...

Meeting Nexi

Nexi, the robot, features in articles on MIT Media Lab’s Center for Future Storytelling. I am not entirely sure why this should be the case. Anyway, I decided to go meet this robot in Cynthea Brazeal’s Personal Robotics Lab . Currently, the humans in the group are training...

Interpreter of Interesting Research

No news story has written itself for me, thus far. This is not a complaint, it is a boast. As a science journalist, I work hard to file good articles, or copy as we say in the business. I translate jargon into narrative for a...

Stata Center

...or one of my most favorite haunts in the world. In its previous avatar it was Building 20, MIT's Magic Incubator, now home to CSAIL. I have often wondered about why the Linguistics Department was housed there along with Computer Science and AI. Finally found...

Snow Monkeys in Japan

“The Japanese macaque, also known as the snow monkey, is a highly intelligent species native to Japan. It is well known for its beet-red bottom and affinity for soaking in hot springs.” In the news in NYT: Last year, a 9-year-old female Japanese macaque in...