artificial-intelligence

Artists who bring to life heroes and villains in animated movies and video games could have more control over their animations, thanks to a new technique introduced by MIT researchers. Their method generates mathematical functions known as barycentric coordinates, which define how 2D and 3D shapes can bend, stretch, and move through space. For example, an artist using their tool …

Imagine you are scrolling through the photos on your phone and you come across an image that at first you can’t recognize. It looks like maybe something fuzzy on the couch; could it be a pillow or a coat? After a couple of seconds it clicks — of course! That ball of fluff is your friend’s cat, Mocha. While some …

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Euclid, known to many as the father of geometry, changed the way we think about shapes. Building off those ancient foundations and millennia of mathematical progress since, Justin Solomon is using modern geometric techniques to solve thorny problems that often seem to have nothing to do with shapes. For instance, perhaps a …

In late November, faculty, staff, and students from across MIT participated in MIT Generative AI Week. The programming included a flagship full-day symposium as well as four subject-specific symposia, all aimed at fostering a dialogue about the opportunities and potential applications of generative artificial intelligence technologies across a diverse range of disciplines. “These events are one expression of our conviction …

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, 12 finalists pitched their ideas …

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 use any synthetic images; it …

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 leads to conceit, and conceit …

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 mechanism that gives the agent …

Connectomics, the ambitious field of study that seeks to map the intricate network of animal brains, is undergoing a growth spurt. Within the span of a decade, it has journeyed from its nascent stages to a discipline that is poised to (hopefully) unlock the enigmas of cognition and the physical underpinning of neuropathologies such as in Alzheimer’s disease. At its …

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 what do people really mean …

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 placed on top of lighter …

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 over. Meet the Air-Guardian, a …

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 Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory …

An age-old adage, often introduced to us during our formative years, is designed to nudge us beyond our self-centered, nascent minds: "Two heads are better than one." This proverb encourages collaborative thinking and highlights the potency of shared intellect. Fast forward to 2023, and we find that this wisdom holds true even in the realm of artificial intelligence: Multiple language …

As 3D printers have become cheaper and more widely accessible, a rapidly growing community of novice makers are fabricating their own objects. To do this, many of these amateur artisans access free, open-source repositories of user-generated 3D models that they download and fabricate on their 3D printer. But adding custom design elements to these models poses a steep challenge for …

The classic computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out” lacks nuance when it comes to understanding biased medical data, argue computer science and bioethics professors from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and the Alan Turing Institute in a new opinion piece published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The rising popularity of artificial intelligence has …

Powerful machine-learning algorithms known as vision and language models, which learn to match text with images, have shown remarkable results when asked to generate captions or summarize videos. While these models excel at identifying objects, they often struggle to understand concepts, like object attributes or the arrangement of items in a scene. For instance, a vision and language model might …

Computing is at an inflection point. Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an electronic chip will double each year, is slowing down due to the physical limits of fitting more transistors on affordable microchips. These increases in computer power are slowing down as the demand grows for high-performance computers that can support increasingly complex artificial intelligence …

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 copy that, might instead try …

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 MIT Computer Science and Artificial …