Microbial sequence databases contain a wealth of information about enzymes and other molecules that could be adapted for biotechnology. But these databases have grown so large in recent years that they’ve become difficult to search efficiently for enzymes of interest.…
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 make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain.
How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? …
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, …
Artificial neural networks, ubiquitous machine-learning models that can be trained to complete many tasks, are so called because their architecture is inspired by the way biological neurons process information in the human brain.
About six years ago, scientists discovered a …
From cameras to self-driving cars, many of today’s technologies depend on artificial intelligence to extract meaning from visual information. Today’s AI technology has artificial neural networks at its core, and most of the time we can trust these AI computer …
How will advances in computing transform human society?
MIT students contemplated this impending question as part of the Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize — an essay contest in which they were challenged to imagine ways that computing technologies could …
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 …
Despite their enormous size and power, today's artificial intelligence systems routinely fail to distinguish between hallucination and reality. Autonomous driving systems can fail to perceive pedestrians and emergency vehicles right in front of them, with fatal consequences. Conversational AI systems …
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 …
Researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have harnessed a natural bacterial system to develop a new protein delivery approach that works in human cells and animals. The technology, …
A new study from researchers at MIT and Brown University characterizes several properties that emerge during the training of deep classifiers, a type of artificial neural network commonly used for classification tasks such as image classification, speech recognition, and natural …
In 2020, the School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company launched the MIT-Takeda Program, which aims to leverage the experience of both entities to solve problems at the intersection of health care, medicine, and artificial intelligence. Since the program began, …
One reason deep learning exploded over the last decade was the availability of programming languages that could automate the math — college-level calculus — that is needed to train each new model. Neural networks are trained by tuning their parameters …
Cognitive scientists have long sought to understand what makes some sentences more difficult to comprehend than others. Any account of language comprehension, researchers believe, would benefit from understanding difficulties in comprehension.
In recent years researchers successfully developed two models explaining …
MIT senior Teresa Gao has been named one of the 12 winners of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship’s Class of 2024. After graduating next spring with a double major in computer science and engineering as well as brain and cognitive …
Neural networks, a type of computing system loosely modeled on the organization of the human brain, form the basis of many artificial intelligence systems for applications such speech recognition, computer vision, and medical image analysis.
In the field of neuroscience, …
Imagine the booming chords from a pipe organ echoing through the cavernous sanctuary of a massive, stone cathedral.
The sound a cathedral-goer will hear is affected by many factors, including the location of the organ, where the listener is standing, …