Data

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 …

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 …

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 …

To get a sense of what StructCode is all about, says Mustafa Doğa Doğan, think of Superman. Not the “faster than a speeding bullet” and “more powerful than a locomotive” version, but a Superman, or Superwoman, who sees the world differently from ordinary mortals — someone who can look around a room and glean all kinds of information about ordinary …

The beauty of a nice infographic published alongside a news or magazine story is that it makes numeric data more accessible to the average reader. But for blind and visually impaired users, such graphics often have the opposite effect. For visually impaired users — who frequently rely on screen-reading software that speaks words or numbers aloud as the user moves …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, and new rules and laws. …

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 and masked data modeling, in …

The MIT-Pillar AI Collective has announced its first six grant recipients. Students, alumni, and postdocs working on a broad range of topics in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science will receive funding and support for research projects that could translate into commercially viable products or companies. These grants are intended to help students explore commercial applications for their research, …

Imagine that a team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model that can predict whether a patient has cancer from lung scan images. They want to share this model with hospitals around the world so clinicians can start using it in diagnosis. But there’s a problem. To teach their model how to predict cancer, they showed it millions of real …

Through a collaboration between M’Care, a 2021 Health Security and Pandemics Solver team, and students from MIT, the landscape of child health care in Nigeria could undergo a transformative change, wherein the power of data is harnessed to improve child health outcomes in economically disadvantaged communities. M’Care is a mobile application of Promane and Promade Limited, developed by Opeoluwa Ashimi, …

The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing has awarded seed grants to seven projects that are exploring how artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction can be leveraged to enhance modern work spaces to achieve better management and higher productivity. Funded by Andrew W. Houston ’05 and Dropbox Inc., the projects are intended to be interdisciplinary and bring together researchers from …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Understanding artificial intelligence and how it relates to matters of national security has become a top priority for military and government leaders in recent years. A new three-day custom program entitled “Artificial Intelligence for National Security Leaders” — AI4NSL for short — aims to educate leaders who may not have a technical background on the basics of AI, machine learning, …