When you picture a hospital radiologist, you might think of a specialist who sits in a dark room and spends hours poring over X-rays to make diagnoses. Contrast that with your dentist, who in addition to interpreting X-rays must also perform surgery, manage staff, communicate with patients, and run their business. When dentists analyze X-rays, …
Read more “Taking the guesswork out of dental care with artificial intelligence”
Hyper-realistic virtual worlds have been heralded as the best driving schools for autonomous vehicles (AVs), since they’ve proven fruitful test beds for safely trying out dangerous driving scenarios. Tesla, Waymo, and other self-driving companies all rely heavily on data to enable expensive and proprietary photorealistic simulators, since testing and gathering nuanced I-almost-crashed data usually isn’t …
Read more “Researchers release open-source photorealistic simulator for autonomous driving”
Identifying causal effects is an integral part of scientific inquiry. It helps us understand everything from educational outcomes to the effects of social policies to risk factors for diseases. Questions of cause-and-effect are also critical for the design and data-driven evaluation of many technological systems we build today. To help data scientists better understand and …
Read more “DoWhy evolves to independent PyWhy model to help causal inference grow”
Many of us easily recognize emotions expressed in others’ faces. A smile may mean happiness, while a frown may indicate anger. Autistic people often have a more difficult time with this task. It’s unclear why. But new research, published June 15 in The Journal of Neuroscience, sheds light on the inner workings of the brain …
Read more “Artificial neural networks model face processing in autism”
Upon looking at photographs and drawing on their past experiences, humans can often perceive depth in pictures that are, themselves, perfectly flat. However, getting computers to do the same thing has proved quite challenging. The problem is difficult for several reasons, one being that information is inevitably lost when a scene that takes place in …
Imagine a more sustainable future, where cellphones, smartwatches, and other wearable devices don’t have to be shelved or discarded for a newer model. Instead, they could be upgraded with the latest sensors and processors that would snap onto a device’s internal chip — like LEGO bricks incorporated into an existing build. Such reconfigurable chipware could …
Read more “Engineers build LEGO-like artificial intelligence chip”
It’s a well-known challenge that large language models (LLMs)—growing in popularity thanks to their adaptability across a variety of applications—carry risks. Because they’re trained on large amounts of data from across the internet, they’re capable of generating inappropriate and harmful language based on similar language encountered during training. Content moderation tools can be deployed to …
From their early days at MIT, and even before, Emma Liu ’22, MNG ’22, Yo-whan “John” Kim ’22, MNG ’22, and Clemente Ocejo ’21, MNG ’22 knew they wanted to perform computational research and explore artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Since high school, I’ve been into deep learning and was involved in projects,” says Kim, …
As babies, we babble and imitate our way to learning languages. We don’t start off reading raw text, which requires fundamental knowledge and understanding about the world, as well as the advanced ability to interpret and infer descriptions and relationships. Rather, humans begin our language journey slowly, by pointing and interacting with our environment, basing …
Collin M. Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor in Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, has been named co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and associate director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), effective June 1. IMES is HST’s home at MIT. Stultz is …