There has been a remarkable surge in the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to address a wide range of problems and challenges. While their adoption, particularly with the rise of AI, is reshaping nearly every industry sector, discipline, and area of research, such innovations often expose unexpected consequences that involve new norms, new expectations, […]
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Socrates once said: “It is not the size of a thing, but the quality that truly matters. For it is in the nature of substance, not its volume, that true value is found.” Does size always matter for large language models (LLMs)? In a technological landscape bedazzled by LLMs taking center stage, a team of […]
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When MIT.nano opened in 2018 in Building 12, now the Lisa T. Su Building, it became the new home at MIT for suites of nanoscale characterization and fabrication equipment, including those previously housed in Building 39. And when a core team of people moved along with these tools and instruments, MIT.nano also became the repository […]
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Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, IBM Research, and elsewhere have developed a new technique for analyzing unlabeled audio and visual data that could improve the performance of machine-learning models used in applications like speech recognition and object detection. The work, for the first time, combines two architectures of self-supervised learning, contrastive learning […]
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When machine-learning models are deployed in real-world situations, perhaps to flag potential disease in X-rays for a radiologist to review, human users need to know when to trust the model’s predictions. But machine-learning models are so large and complex that even the scientists who design them don’t understand exactly how the models make predictions. So, […]
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Someone learning to play tennis might hire a teacher to help them learn faster. Because this teacher is (hopefully) a great tennis player, there are times when trying to exactly mimic the teacher won’t help the student learn. Perhaps the teacher leaps high into the air to deftly return a volley. The student, unable to […]
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CoCo is a new co-creative learning platform that empowers educators to engage children and teens in an endless variety of collaborative creative computing experiences with peers — regardless of whether they are sitting next to one another in a classroom or connecting remotely across continents. The platform supports real-time collaboration across multiple types of interactive […]
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“Every time I try to solve a problem — whether it be physics or computer science — I always try to find an elegant solution,” says MIT senior Thomas Bergamaschi, who spent four years learning how to solve problems while an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) student in the Engineering Quantum Systems (EQUS) laboratory at […]
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MIT undergraduates Rupert Li and Audrey Xie have been selected to receive Barry Goldwater Scholarships for the 2023-24 academic year. From an estimated pool of more than 5,000 college sophomores and juniors, nearly 1,300 students were nominated by 427 academic institutions to compete for the scholarship, with Li and Xie representing two of only 413 […]
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The “interdisciplinary approach” is something that has been lauded for decades for its ability to break down silos and create new integrated approaches to research. For Munther Dahleh, founding director of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), showing the community that data science and statistics can transcend individual disciplines and form a […]
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Kelsey Merrill ’22, MEng ’23, a master’s of engineering student in electrical engineering and computer science, has been recognized by the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge (ALL IN) for her outstanding efforts to advance nonpartisan democratic engagement at MIT. She joins 175 students nationwide named to the ALL IN Student Voting Honor Roll for promoting […]
Read More Kelsey Merrill ’22, MEng ’23, a master’s of engineering student in electrical engineering and computer science, has been recognized by the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge (ALL IN) for her outstanding efforts to advance nonpartisan democratic engagement at MIT. She joins 175 students nationwide named to the ALL IN Student Voting Honor Roll for promoting […]
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Despite their enormous size and power, today’s artificial intelligence systems routinely fail to distinguish between hallucination and reality. Autonomous driving systems can fail to perceive pedestrians and emergency vehicles right in front of them, with fatal consequences. Conversational AI systems confidently make up facts and, after training via reinforcement learning, often fail to give accurate […]
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On April 24, MIT celebrated outstanding students and employees at the annual Change-Maker Awards for their diligent work to eradicate sexual misconduct and support survivors. These architects of positive change exemplify one of MIT’s core values: striving to make our community a more humane and welcoming place where all can thrive. Hosted by MIT Violence […]
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Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves. These waves eventually push […]
Read More Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves. These waves eventually push […]
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In computer graphics and computer-aided design (CAD), 3D objects are often represented by the contours of their outer surfaces. Computers store these shapes as “thin shells,” which model the contours of the skin of an animated character but not the flesh underneath. This modeling decision makes it efficient to store and manipulate 3D shapes, but […]
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A robot manipulating objects while, say, working in a kitchen, will benefit from understanding which items are composed of the same materials. With this knowledge, the robot would know to exert a similar amount of force whether it picks up a small pat of butter from a shadowy corner of the counter or an entire […]
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Whether you are a new employee, a gymnast, or a bendy straw manufacturer, one trait is ideal across the board: flexibility. The same can now be said about prototyping electronic devices. While designers typically test out their designs on “breadboards,” or thin plastic boards that can hold together electronic components, they are often stiff and […]
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The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced the recipients of its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards for 2023. This year, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) professors George Barbasthasis and John Hart, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Assistant Professor Pulkit Agrawal, and MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering […]
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The advent of generative artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT has prompted renewed calls for AI in health care, and its support base only appears to be broadening. The second annual MIT-MGB AI Cures Conference, hosted on April 24 by the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic), saw its attendance nearly […]
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Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) announced its ninth round of seed grants to support innovative research projects at MIT. The grants are designed to fund research efforts that tackle challenges related to water and food for human use, with the ultimate goal of creating meaningful impact as the world […]
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To study ocean currents, scientists release GPS-tagged buoys in the ocean and record their velocities to reconstruct the currents that transport them. These buoy data are also used to identify “divergences,” which are areas where water rises up from below the surface or sinks beneath it. By accurately predicting currents and pinpointing divergences, scientists can […]
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Thirteen MIT undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni have been awarded Fulbright fellowships and will embark on projects overseas in the 2023-24 grant year. Four other MIT affiliates were offered awards but declined them to pursue other opportunities. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers American citizen students and recent […]
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Four researchers with ties to MIT have been named Schmidt Science Fellows this year. Lillian Chin ’17, SM ’19; Neil Dalvie PD ’22, PhD ’22; Suong Nguyen, and Yirui Zhang SM ’19, PhD ’23 are among the 32 exceptional early-career scientists worldwide chosen to receive the prestigious fellowships. “History provides powerful examples of what happens […]
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The National Academy of Sciences has elected 120 members and 23 international members, including five faculty members from MIT. Joshua Angrist, Gang Chen, Catherine Drennan, Dina Katabi, and Gregory Stephanopoulos were elected in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Membership to the National Academy of Sciences is one of the highest […]
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Words, data, and algorithms combine, An article about LLMs, so divine. A glimpse into a linguistic world, Where language machines are unfurled. It was a natural inclination to task a large language model (LLM) like CHATGPT with creating a poem that delves into the topic of large language models, and subsequently utilize said poem as an introductory […]
Read MoreIn an effort to improve fairness or reduce backlogs, machine-learning models are sometimes designed to mimic human decision making, such as deciding whether social media posts violate toxic content policies. But researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that these models often do not replicate human decisions about rule violations. If models are not trained […]
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MIT senior Pam Stark and alumni Bhav Jain and Sreya Vangara are recipients of this year’s Knight-Hennessy Scholarship awards. The fellowship funds graduate studies for up to three years in any field at Stanford University. The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program aims to develop emerging leaders who have a strong multidisciplinary and multicultural perspective, a commitment to […]
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Imagine sitting on a park bench, watching someone stroll by. While the scene may constantly change as the person walks, the human brain can transform that dynamic visual information into a more stable representation over time. This ability, known as perceptual straightening, helps us predict the walking person’s trajectory. Unlike humans, computer vision models don’t […]
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Capturing energy from the winds gusting off the coasts of the United States could more than double the nation’s electricity generation. It’s no wonder the Biden administration views this immense, clean-energy resource as central to its ambitious climate goals of 100 percent carbon-emissions-free electricity by 2035 and a net-zero emissions economy by 2050. The White […]
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