The German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche once said that “invisible threads are the strongest ties.” One could think of “invisible threads” as tying together related objects, like the homes on a delivery driver’s route, or more nebulous entities, such as transactions in a financial network or users in a social network. Computer scientist Julian Shun studies […]
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Imagine you’re tasked with sending a team of football players onto a field to assess the condition of the grass (a likely task for them, of course). If you pick their positions randomly, they might cluster together in some areas while completely neglecting others. But if you give them a strategy, like spreading out uniformly […]
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Have you ever wanted to travel through time to see what your future self might be like? Now, thanks to the power of generative AI, you can. Researchers from MIT and elsewhere created a system that enables users to have an online, text-based conversation with an AI-generated simulation of their potential future self. Dubbed Future You, […]
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In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects when they aren’t really there? A new study […]
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A new, multidisciplinary MIT graduate program in music technology and computation will feature faculty, labs, and curricula from across the Institute. The program is a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS); Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in the School of Engineering; […]
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AI systems are increasingly being deployed in safety-critical health care situations. Yet these models sometimes hallucinate incorrect information, make biased predictions, or fail for unexpected reasons, which could have serious consequences for patients and clinicians. In a commentary article published today in Nature Computational Science, MIT Associate Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi and Boston University Associate Professor Elaine […]
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MIT has placed second in U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings of the nation’s best colleges and universities, announced today. As in past years, MIT’s engineering program continues to lead the list of undergraduate engineering programs at a doctoral institution. The Institute also placed first in six out of nine engineering disciplines. U.S. News placed MIT […]
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A new study from researchers at MIT and Penn State University reveals that if large language models were to be used in home surveillance, they could recommend calling the police even when surveillance videos show no criminal activity. In addition, the models the researchers studied were inconsistent in which videos they flagged for police intervention. […]
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Ever been asked a question you only knew part of the answer to? To give a more informed response, your best move would be to phone a friend with more knowledge on the subject. This collaborative process can also help large language models (LLMs) improve their accuracy. Still, it’s been difficult to teach LLMs to […]
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One of the biggest reasons virtual reality hasn’t taken off is the clunky headsets that users have to wear. But what if you could get the benefits of virtual reality without the headsets, using screens that computationally improve the images they display? That’s the goal of the startup Brelyon, which is commercializing a new kind […]
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To the untrained eye, a medical image like an MRI or X-ray appears to be a murky collection of black-and-white blobs. It can be a struggle to decipher where one structure (like a tumor) ends and another begins. When trained to understand the boundaries of biological structures, AI systems can segment (or delineate) regions of […]
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Sam Madden, the College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing at MIT, has been named the new faculty head of computer science in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), effective Aug. 1. Madden succeeds Arvind, a longtime MIT professor and prolific computer scientist, who passed away in June. “Sam’s research leadership […]
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The field of mechatronics is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, occupying the intersection of mechanical systems, electronics, controls, and computer science. Mechatronics engineers work in a variety of industries — from space exploration to semiconductor manufacturing to product design — and specialize in the integrated design and development of intelligent systems. For students wanting to learn mechatronics, […]
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In order to train more powerful large language models, researchers use vast dataset collections that blend diverse data from thousands of web sources. But as these datasets are combined and recombined into multiple collections, important information about their origins and restrictions on how they can be used are often lost or confounded in the shuffle. […]
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Charalampos (Haris) Sampalis was well established in his career as a product manager at a telecommunications company in Greece. Yet, as someone who enjoys learning, he was on a mission to acquire more knowledge and develop new skills. That’s how he discovered MIT Open Learning resources. With a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the […]
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Computer graphics and geometry processing research provide the tools needed to simulate physical phenomena like fire and flames, aiding the creation of visual effects in video games and movies as well as the fabrication of complex geometric shapes using tools like 3D printing. Under the hood, mathematical problems called partial differential equations (PDEs) model these […]
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The most recent email you sent was likely encrypted using a tried-and-true method that relies on the idea that even the fastest computer would be unable to efficiently break a gigantic number into factors. Quantum computers, on the other hand, promise to rapidly crack complex cryptographic systems that a classical computer might never be able […]
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Identifying one faulty turbine in a wind farm, which can involve looking at hundreds of signals and millions of data points, is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Engineers often streamline this complex problem using deep-learning models that can detect anomalies in measurements taken repeatedly over time by each turbine, known as time-series […]
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The Olympics is all about pushing the frontiers of human performance. As some athletes prepared for the Paris 2024 games, that included using a new technology developed at MIT.nano. The technology was created by Striv (pronounced “strive”), a startup whose founder gained access to the cutting-edge labs and fabrication equipment at MIT.nano as part of […]
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In 2021, a team led by MIT physicists reported creating a new ultrathin ferroelectric material, or one where positive and negative charges separate into different layers. At the time they noted the material’s potential for applications in computer memory and much more. Now the same core team and colleagues — including two from the lab […]
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Organizations are increasingly utilizing machine-learning models to allocate scarce resources or opportunities. For instance, such models can help companies screen resumes to choose job interview candidates or aid hospitals in ranking kidney transplant patients based on their likelihood of survival. When deploying a model, users typically strive to ensure its predictions are fair by reducing […]
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As artificial intelligence models become increasingly prevalent and are integrated into diverse sectors like health care, finance, education, transportation, and entertainment, understanding how they work under the hood is critical. Interpreting the mechanisms underlying AI models enables us to audit them for safety and biases, with the potential to deepen our understanding of the science […]
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One thing that makes large language models (LLMs) so powerful is the diversity of tasks to which they can be applied. The same machine-learning model that can help a graduate student draft an email could also aid a clinician in diagnosing cancer. However, the wide applicability of these models also makes them challenging to evaluate […]
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Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is a type of preinvasive tumor that sometimes progresses to a highly deadly form of breast cancer. It accounts for about 25 percent of all breast cancer diagnoses. Because it is difficult for clinicians to determine the type and stage of DCIS, patients with DCIS are often overtreated. To address […]
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What does your license plate say about you? In the United States, more than 9 million vehicles carry personalized “vanity” license plates, in which preferred words, digits, or phrases replace an otherwise random assignment of letters and numbers to identify a vehicle. While each state and the District of Columbia maintains its own rules about […]
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Neural networks have made a seismic impact on how engineers design controllers for robots, catalyzing more adaptive and efficient machines. Still, these brain-like machine-learning systems are a double-edged sword: Their complexity makes them powerful, but it also makes it difficult to guarantee that a robot powered by a neural network will safely accomplish its task. […]
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It is estimated that about 70 percent of the energy generated worldwide ends up as waste heat. If scientists could better predict how heat moves through semiconductors and insulators, they could design more efficient power generation systems. However, the thermal properties of materials can be exceedingly difficult to model. The trouble comes from phonons, which […]
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Foundation models are massive deep-learning models that have been pretrained on an enormous amount of general-purpose, unlabeled data. They can be applied to a variety of tasks, like generating images or answering customer questions. But these models, which serve as the backbone for powerful artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, can offer up incorrect […]
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The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing recently marked a significant milestone as it celebrated the completion and inauguration of its new building on Vassar Street with a dedication ceremony. Attended by members of the MIT community, distinguished guests, and supporters, the ceremony provided an opportunity to reflect on the transformative gift that initiated the […]
Read MoreWhen it comes to artificial intelligence, appearances can be deceiving. The mystery surrounding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) stems from their vast size, complex training methods, hard-to-predict behaviors, and elusive interpretability. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers recently peered into the proverbial magnifying glass to examine how LLMs fare […]
Read MoreBecause machine-learning models can give false predictions, researchers often equip them with the ability to tell a user how confident they are about a certain decision. This is especially important in high-stake settings, such as when models are used to help identify disease in medical images or filter job applications. But a model’s uncertainty quantifications […]
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