Where there’s smoke, there is fire. But with climate change, larger and longer-burning wildfires are sending smoke farther from their source, often to places that are unaccustomed to the exposure. That’s been the case this week, as smoke continues to drift south from massive wildfires in Canada, prompting warnings of hazardous air quality, and poor […]
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When MIT’s mini cheetah perfectly executed a backflip on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the audience screamed and applauded wildly. If this machine — which also pranced around the stage like a show dog and stretched in several different directions — could perform such a difficult maneuver, one that is impossible for most humans, […]
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Chemical “upcycling,” or converting plastics into higher-value products, to the left. Materials that repair damage and restore themselves to the right. Straight ahead: fibers that can be woven into fabrics and used as microphones or loudspeakers. Such was the varied innovation that crowded MIT’s Morss Hall on Polymer Day 2023. Sixty-four teams from schools throughout […]
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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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Huge libraries of drug compounds may hold potential treatments for a variety of diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally test each of these compounds against all possible targets, but doing that kind of screen is prohibitively time-consuming. In recent years, researchers have begun using computational methods to screen […]
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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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Aviation’s huge carbon footprint could shrink significantly with electrification. To date, however, only small all-electric planes have gotten off the ground. Their electric motors generate hundreds of kilowatts of power. To electrify larger, heavier jets, such as commercial airliners, megawatt-scale motors are required. These would be propelled by hybrid or turbo-electric propulsion systems where an […]
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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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“May we breathe life into the values we espouse as a community,” enjoined Senior Associate Dean Blanche Staton at a recent reception to honor MIT Graduate Women of Excellence. “May we bring our minds, hands, and hearts into our places and spaces, and may we continue to lift up our graduate women and all our […]
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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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Kirigami takes pop-up books to a whole new level. The Japanese paper craft involves cutting patterns in paper to transform a two-dimensional sheet into an intricate, three-dimensional structure when partially folded. In the hands of an artist, kirigami can yield remarkably detailed and delicate replicas of structures in nature, architecture, and more. Scientists and engineers […]
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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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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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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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Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, researchers at MIT and McMaster University have identified a new antibiotic that can kill a type of bacteria that is responsible for many drug-resistant infections. If developed for use in patients, the drug could help to combat Acinetobacter baumannii, a species of bacteria that is often found in hospitals and […]
Read More Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, researchers at MIT and McMaster University have identified a new antibiotic that can kill a type of bacteria that is responsible for many drug-resistant infections. If developed for use in patients, the drug could help to combat Acinetobacter baumannii, a species of bacteria that is often found in hospitals and […]
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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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Theo St. Francis is an MIT senior majoring in aeronautics and astronautics. He is graduating this month with a concentration in Portuguese, and has visited Brazil with the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives’ Global Teaching Labs. This year, St. Francis was the recipient of the Global Languages Margarita Ribas Groeger Distinguished Scholar award. In […]
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When we think of getting on the road in our cars, our first thoughts may not be that fellow drivers are particularly safe or careful — but human drivers are more reliable than one may expect. For each fatal car crash in the United States, motor vehicles log a whopping hundred million miles on the […]
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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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Professor Daniel Anderson has won the 2023 Wilhelm Exner Medal, awarded by the Austrian Industry Association, for excellence in research and science since 1921. Anderson will receive the award during the Wilhelm Exner Medal Foundation’s Exner Lectures, May 22-23 in Vienna, Austria. “Professor Anderson has changed our world,” says Elazer R. Edelman, Edward J. Poitras […]
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The materials key to many important applications in aerospace and energy generation must be able to withstand extreme conditions such as high temperatures and tensile stresses without failing. Now a team of MIT-led engineers reports a simple, inexpensive way to strengthen one of the key materials used today in such applications. Further, the team believes […]
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