Tag: Computer science and technology

AI accelerates problem-solving in complex scenarios

While Santa Claus may have a magical sleigh and nine plucky reindeer to help him deliver presents, for companies like FedEx, the optimization problem of efficiently routing holiday packages is so complicated that they often employ specialized software to find a solution. This software, called a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) solver, splits a massive optimization […]

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A new optimization framework for robot motion planning

It isn’t easy for a robot to find its way out of a maze. Picture the machines trying to traverse a kid’s playroom to reach the kitchen, with miscellaneous toys scattered across the floor and furniture blocking some potential paths. This messy labyrinth requires the robot to calculate the most optimal journey to its destination, […]

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What does the future hold for generative AI?

Speaking at the “Generative AI: Shaping the Future” symposium on Nov. 28, the kickoff event of MIT’s Generative AI Week, keynote speaker and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks warned attendees against uncritically overestimating the capabilities of this emerging technology, which underpins increasingly powerful tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. “Hype leads to hubris, and hubris […]

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New method uses crowdsourced feedback to help train robots

To teach an AI agent a new task, like how to open a kitchen cabinet, researchers often use reinforcement learning — a trial-and-error process where the agent is rewarded for taking actions that get it closer to the goal. In many instances, a human expert must carefully design a reward function, which is an incentive […]

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Search algorithm reveals nearly 200 new kinds of CRISPR systems

Microbial sequence databases contain a wealth of information about enzymes and other molecules that could be adapted for biotechnology. But these databases have grown so large in recent years that they’ve become difficult to search efficiently for enzymes of interest. Now, scientists at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Broad Institute of […]

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Students pitch transformative ideas in generative AI at MIT Ignite competition

This semester, students and postdocs across MIT were invited to submit ideas for the first-ever MIT Ignite: Generative AI Entrepreneurship Competition. Over 100 teams submitted proposals for startups that utilize generative artificial intelligence technologies to develop solutions across a diverse range of disciplines including human health, climate change, education, and workforce dynamics. On Oct. 30, […]

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Synthetic imagery sets new bar in AI training efficiency

Data is the new soil, and in this fertile new ground, MIT researchers are planting more than just pixels. By using synthetic images to train machine learning models, a team of scientists recently surpassed results obtained from traditional “real-image” training methods.  At the core of the approach is a system called StableRep, which doesn’t just […]

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Technique enables AI on edge devices to keep learning over time

Personalized deep-learning models can enable artificial intelligence chatbots that adapt to understand a user’s accent or smart keyboards that continuously update to better predict the next word based on someone’s typing history. This customization requires constant fine-tuning of a machine-learning model with new data. Because smartphones and other edge devices lack the memory and computational […]

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Writing code, and decoding the world

Several years ago, MIT anthropologist Héctor Beltrán ’07 attended an event in Mexico billed as the first all-women’s hackathon in Latin America. But the programmers were not the only women there. When the time came for the hackathon pitches, a large number of family members arrived to watch. “Grandmothers and mothers showed up to cheer […]

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Explained: Generative AI

A quick scan of the headlines makes it seem like generative artificial intelligence is everywhere these days. In fact, some of those headlines may actually have been written by generative AI, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot that has demonstrated an uncanny ability to produce text that seems to have been written by a human. But […]

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MIT engineers are on a failure-finding mission

From vehicle collision avoidance to airline scheduling systems to power supply grids, many of the services we rely on are managed by computers. As these autonomous systems grow in complexity and ubiquity, so too could the ways in which they fail. Now, MIT engineers have developed an approach that can be paired with any autonomous […]

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Using language to give robots a better grasp of an open-ended world

Imagine you’re visiting a friend abroad, and you look inside their fridge to see what would make for a great breakfast. Many of the items initially appear foreign to you, with each one encased in unfamiliar packaging and containers. Despite these visual distinctions, you begin to understand what each one is used for and pick […]

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New techniques efficiently accelerate sparse tensors for massive AI models

Researchers from MIT and NVIDIA have developed two techniques that accelerate the processing of sparse tensors, a type of data structure that’s used for high-performance computing tasks. The complementary techniques could result in significant improvements to the performance and energy-efficiency of systems like the massive machine-learning models that drive generative artificial intelligence. Tensors are data […]

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Accelerating AI tasks while preserving data security

With the proliferation of computationally intensive machine-learning applications, such as chatbots that perform real-time language translation, device manufacturers often incorporate specialized hardware components to rapidly move and process the massive amounts of data these systems demand. Choosing the best design for these components, known as deep neural network accelerators, is challenging because they can have […]

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Making genetic prediction models more inclusive

While any two human genomes are about 99.9 percent identical, genetic variation in the remaining 0.1 percent plays an important role in shaping human diversity, including a person’s risk for developing certain diseases. Measuring the cumulative effect of these small genetic differences can provide an estimate of an individual’s genetic risk for a particular disease […]

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Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 describes the secrets of semiconductor success

Groundbreaking technologist Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 discussed the key elements behind Taiwan’s long-term ascendancy in semiconductor manufacturing, while speaking to a large campus audience in an MIT talk on Tuesday. Chang is the influential founder and former longtime head of TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which has become the world’s leading microchip maker. […]

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To excel at engineering design, generative AI must learn to innovate, study finds

ChatGPT and other deep generative models are proving to be uncanny mimics. These AI supermodels can churn out poems, finish symphonies, and create new videos and images by automatically learning from millions of examples of previous works. These enormously powerful and versatile tools excel at generating new content that resembles everything they’ve seen before. But […]

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A new way to integrate data with physical objects

To get a sense of what StructCode is all about, says Mustafa Doğa Doğan, think of Superman. Not the “faster than a speeding bullet” and “more powerful than a locomotive” version, but a Superman, or Superwoman, who sees the world differently from ordinary mortals — someone who can look around a room and glean all […]

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New technique helps robots pack objects into a tight space

Anyone who has ever tried to pack a family-sized amount of luggage into a sedan-sized trunk knows this is a hard problem. Robots struggle with dense packing tasks, too. For the robot, solving the packing problem involves satisfying many constraints, such as stacking luggage so suitcases don’t topple out of the trunk, heavy objects aren’t […]

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A method to interpret AI might not be so interpretable after all

As autonomous systems and artificial intelligence become increasingly common in daily life, new methods are emerging to help humans check that these systems are behaving as expected. One method, called formal specifications, uses mathematical formulas that can be translated into natural-language expressions. Some researchers claim that this method can be used to spell out decisions […]

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Study: Deep neural networks don’t see the world the way we do

Human sensory systems are very good at recognizing objects that we see or words that we hear, even if the object is upside down or the word is spoken by a voice we’ve never heard. Computational models known as deep neural networks can be trained to do the same thing, correctly identifying an image of […]

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New tools are available to help reduce the energy that AI models devour

When searching for flights on Google, you may have noticed that each flight’s carbon-emission estimate is now presented next to its cost. It’s a way to inform customers about their environmental impact, and to let them factor this information into their decision-making. A similar kind of transparency doesn’t yet exist for the computing industry, despite […]

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Finger-shaped sensor enables more dexterous robots

Imagine grasping a heavy object, like a pipe wrench, with one hand. You would likely grab the wrench using your entire fingers, not just your fingertips. Sensory receptors in your skin, which run along the entire length of each finger, would send information to your brain about the tool you are grasping. In a robotic […]

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AI copilot enhances human precision for safer aviation

Imagine you’re in an airplane with two pilots, one human and one computer. Both have their “hands” on the controllers, but they’re always looking out for different things. If they’re both paying attention to the same thing, the human gets to steer. But if the human gets distracted or misses something, the computer quickly takes […]

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A more effective experimental design for engineering a cell into a new state

A strategy for cellular reprogramming involves using targeted genetic interventions to engineer a cell into a new state. The technique holds great promise in immunotherapy, for instance, where researchers could reprogram a patient’s T-cells so they are more potent cancer killers. Someday, the approach could also help identify life-saving cancer treatments or regenerative therapies that […]

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Is AI in the eye of the beholder?

Someone’s prior beliefs about an artificial intelligence agent, like a chatbot, have a significant effect on their interactions with that agent and their perception of its trustworthiness, empathy, and effectiveness, according to a new study. Researchers from MIT and Arizona State University found that priming users — by telling them that a conversational AI agent […]

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Giving students the computational chops to tackle 21st-century challenges

Graduate student Nikasha Patel ’22 is using artificial intelligence to build a computational model of how infants learn to walk, which could help robots acquire motor skills in a similar fashion. Her research, which sits at the intersection of reinforcement learning and motor learning, uses tools and techniques from computer science to study the brain […]

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Decoding the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease affects more than 6 million people in the United States, and there are very few FDA-approved treatments that can slow the progression of the disease. In hopes of discovering new targets for potential Alzheimer’s treatments, MIT researchers have performed the broadest analysis yet of the genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic changes that occur in […]

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Quantum repeaters use defects in diamond to interconnect quantum systems

The popular children’s game of telephone is based on a simple premise: The starting player whispers a message into the ear of the next player. That second player then passes along the message to the third person and so on until the message reaches the final recipient, who relays it to the group aloud. Often, […]

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From physics to generative AI: An AI model for advanced pattern generation

Generative AI, which is currently riding a crest of popular discourse, promises a world where the simple transforms into the complex — where a simple distribution evolves into intricate patterns of images, sounds, or text, rendering the artificial startlingly real.  The realms of imagination no longer remain as mere abstractions, as researchers from MIT’s Computer […]

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3 Questions: A new PhD program from the Center for Computational Science and Engineering

This fall, the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE), an academic unit in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, is introducing a new standalone PhD degree program that will enable students to pursue research in cross-cutting methodological aspects of computational science and engineering. The launch follows approval of the center’s degree program proposal at […]

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