Computer science and technology

Imagine you want to carry a large, heavy box up a flight of stairs. You might spread your fingers out and lift that box with both hands, then hold it on top of your forearms and balance it against your chest, using your whole body to manipulate the box. Humans are generally good at whole-body manipulation, but robots struggle with …

Compared to other imaging modalities like X-rays or CT scans, MRI scans provide high-quality soft tissue contrast. Unfortunately, MRI is highly sensitive to motion, with even the smallest of movements resulting in image artifacts. These artifacts put patients at risk of misdiagnoses or inappropriate treatment when critical details are obscured from the physician. But researchers at MIT may have developed …

Prior to receiving a PhD in computer science from MIT in 2017, Marzyeh Ghassemi had already begun to wonder whether the use of AI techniques might enhance the biases that already existed in health care. She was one of the early researchers to take up this issue, and she’s been exploring it ever since. In a new paper, Ghassemi, now …

As we enter a new era where technologies powered by artificial intelligence can craft and manipulate images with a precision that blurs the line between reality and fabrication, the specter of misuse looms large. Recently, advanced generative models such as DALL-E and Midjourney, celebrated for their impressive precision and user-friendly interfaces, have made the production of hyper-realistic images relatively effortless. …

Imagine purchasing a robot to perform household tasks. This robot was built and trained in a factory on a certain set of tasks and has never seen the items in your home. When you ask it to pick up a mug from your kitchen table, it might not recognize your mug (perhaps because this mug is painted with an unusual …

From an early age, Will Sussman’s family instilled in him the value of education. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my grandparents were teachers,” he says. Now, at MIT, “The energy of a campus, bustling with students, in turn energizes me.” A second-year doctoral student in electrical engineering and computer science and affiliate of the Computer Science …

Discovering new materials and drugs typically involves a manual, trial-and-error process that can take decades and cost millions of dollars. To streamline this process, scientists often use machine learning to predict molecular properties and narrow down the molecules they need to synthesize and test in the lab. Researchers from MIT and the MIT-Watson AI Lab have developed a new, unified …

A savvy hacker can obtain secret information, such as a password, by observing a computer program’s behavior, like how much time that program spends accessing the computer’s memory. Security approaches that completely block these “side-channel attacks” are so computationally expensive that they aren’t feasible for many real-world systems. Instead, engineers often apply what are known as obfuscation schemes that seek …

Chart captions that explain complex trends and patterns are important for improving a reader’s ability to comprehend and retain the data being presented. And for people with visual disabilities, the information in a caption often provides their only means of understanding the chart. But writing effective, detailed captions is a labor-intensive process. While autocaptioning techniques can alleviate this burden, they …

Computers possess two remarkable capabilities with respect to images: They can both identify them and generate them anew. Historically, these functions have stood separate, akin to the disparate acts of a chef who is good at creating dishes (generation), and a connoisseur who is good at tasting dishes (recognition). Yet, one can’t help but wonder: What would it take to …

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 stick from inside the brightly …

A three-year recipient of MIT’s Emerson Classical Vocal Scholarships, senior Ananya Gurumurthy recalls getting ready to step onto the Carnegie Hall stage to sing a Mozart opera that she once sang with the New York All-State Choir. The choir conductor reminded her to articulate her words and to engage her diaphragm. “If you don’t project your voice, how are people …

Yael Tauman Kalai PhD ’06, an MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) adjunct professor, member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research has been awarded the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing for “breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography” by the Association for …

Sometime in 2019, MIT PhD student Ajay Brahmakshatriya formulated a simple, though still quite challenging, goal. He wanted to make it possible for people who had expertise in a particular domain — such as climate modeling, bioinformatics, or architecture — to write their own programming languages, so-called domain-specific languages (or DSLs), even if they had little or no experience in …

If you've ever played soccer with a robot, it's a familiar feeling. Sun glistens down on your face as the smell of grass permeates the air. You look around. A four-legged robot is hustling toward you, dribbling with determination. While the bot doesn’t display a Lionel Messi-like level of ability, it's an impressive in-the-wild dribbling system nonetheless. Researchers from MIT's …

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 double this year, with over …

In the vast, expansive skies where birds once ruled supreme, a new crop of aviators is taking flight. These pioneers of the air are not living creatures, but rather a product of deliberate innovation: drones. But these aren’t your typical flying bots, humming around like mechanical bees. Rather, they’re avian-inspired marvels that soar through the sky, guided by liquid neural …

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has ignited a deep philosophical exploration into the nature of consciousness, creativity, and authorship. As we bear witness to new advances in the field, it’s increasingly apparent that these synthetic agents possess a remarkable capacity to create, iterate, and challenge our traditional notions of intelligence. But what does it really mean for an AI …

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 piece for this …

In 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 with the right data, they …