Some people pass the time with hobbies like crossword puzzles or Sudoku. When Chris Rackauckas has a spare moment, he often uses it to answer questions about numerical differential equations that people have posed online. Rackauckas — previously an MIT applied...
Not all data are created equal. But how much information is any piece of data likely to contain? This question is central to medical testing, designing scientific experiments, and even to everyday human learning and thinking. MIT researchers have developed a...
From “Star Wars” to “Happy Feet,” many beloved films contain scenes that were made possible by motion capture technology, which records movement of objects or people through video. Further, applications for this tracking, which involve complicated interactions...
Robots are already adept at certain things, such as lifting objects that are too heavy or cumbersome for people to manage. Another application they’re well suited for is the precision assembly of items like watches that have large numbers of tiny parts — some...
Surveillance cameras have an identity problem, fueled by an inherent tension between utility and privacy. As these powerful little devices have cropped up seemingly everywhere, the use of machine learning tools has automated video content analysis at a massive...
At just one year old, a baby is more dexterous than a robot. Sure, machines can do more than just pick up and put down objects, but we’re not quite there as far as replicating a natural pull toward exploratory or sophisticated dexterous manipulation goes. ...
In the 1960s, the advent of computer-aided design (CAD) sparked a revolution in design. For his PhD thesis in 1963, MIT Professor Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a game-changing software program that enabled users to draw, move, and resize shapes on a...
While working toward her dissertation in computer science at MIT, Marzyeh Ghassemi wrote several papers on how machine-learning techniques from artificial intelligence could be applied to clinical data in order to predict patient outcomes. “It wasn’t until the...
While mammograms are currently the gold standard in breast cancer screening, swirls of controversy exist regarding when and how often they should be administered. On the one hand, advocates argue for the ability to save lives: Women aged 60-69 who receive...
Scientists, students, and community members came together last month to discuss the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for the fourth TEDxMIT event held at MIT. Attendees...
For all that neural networks can accomplish, we still don’t really understand how they operate. Sure, we can program them to learn, but making sense of a machine’s decision-making process remains much like a fancy puzzle with a dizzying, complex pattern where...
