Research

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 …

Engineers are constantly searching for materials with novel, desirable property combinations. For example, an ultra-strong, lightweight material could be used to make airplanes and cars more fuel-efficient, or a material that is porous and biomechanically friendly could be useful for bone implants. Cellular metamaterials — artificial structures composed of units, or cells, that repeat in various patterns — can help …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Imagine sitting on a park bench, watching someone stroll by. While the scene may constantly change as the person walks, the human brain can transform that dynamic visual information into a more stable representation over time. This ability, known as perceptual straightening, helps us predict the walking person’s trajectory. Unlike humans, computer vision models don’t typically exhibit perceptual straightness, so …