Matthew Kearney was drawn to MIT by the culture of its cross-country team. Growing up in Austin, Texas, he loved spending time outdoors and playing soccer, but by high school running had become his primary sport. While looking at colleges, …
One of the 12 labors of Hercules, according to ancient lore, was to destroy a nine-headed monster called the Hydra. The challenge was that when Hercules used his sword to chop off one of the monster’s heads, two would grow …
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 …
Turns out, even language models “think” they’re biased. When prompted in ChatGPT, the response was as follows: “Yes, language models can have biases, because the training data reflects the biases present in society from which that data was collected. For …
In a packed room in MIT’s Stata Center, hundreds of digital robots collide across a giant screen projected at the front of the room. A crowd of students in the audience gasps and cheers as the battle’s outcome hangs in …
Modern fabrication tools such as 3D printers can make structural materials in shapes that would have been difficult or impossible using conventional tools. Meanwhile, new generative design systems can take great advantage of this flexibility to create innovative designs for
Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are massive neural networks that can generate human-like text, from poetry to programming code. Trained using troves of internet data, these machine-learning models take a small bit of input text and then predict the …
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 …
In science and technology, there has been a long and steady drive toward improving the accuracy of measurements of all kinds, along with parallel efforts to enhance the resolution of images. An accompanying goal is to reduce the uncertainty in …
The name Sybil has its origins in the oracles of Ancient Greece, also known as sibyls: feminine figures who were relied upon to relay divine knowledge of the unseen and the omnipotent past, present, and future. Now, the name has …
Taking what they learned conceptually about artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) this year, students from across the Greater Boston area had the opportunity to apply their new skills to real-world industry projects as part of an experiential learning opportunity …
When deep learning models are deployed in the real world, perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images, they are often able to outperform humans.
But what exactly are these deep learning models …
Have you ever been advised to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes?” Considering another person’s perspective can be a challenging endeavor — but recognizing our errors and biases is key to building understanding across communities. By challenging our preconceptions, …
It’s no secret that people harbor biases — some unconscious, perhaps, and others painfully overt. The average person might suppose that computers — machines typically made of plastic, steel, glass, silicon, and various metals — are free of prejudice. While …
As a graduate student doing his master’s thesis on speech recognition at the MIT AI Lab (now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), Dan Huttenlocher worked closely with Professor Victor Zue. Well known for pioneering the development of …
Graphs, a potentially extensive web of nodes connected by edges, can be used to express and interrogate relationships between data, like social connections, financial transactions, traffic, energy grids, and molecular interactions. As researchers collect more data and build out these …
Picture two teams squaring off on a football field. The players can cooperate to achieve an objective, and compete against other players with conflicting interests. That’s how the game works.
Creating artificial intelligence agents that can learn to compete and …
Before a machine-learning model can complete a task, such as identifying cancer in medical images, the model must be trained. Training image classification models typically involves showing the model millions of example images gathered into a massive dataset.
However, using …
Last year, MIT researchers announced that they had built “liquid” neural networks, inspired by the brains of small species: a class of flexible, robust machine learning models that learn on the job and can adapt to changing conditions, for real-world …
It’s a dilemma as old as time. Friday night has rolled around, and you’re trying to pick a restaurant for dinner. Should you visit your most beloved watering hole or try a new establishment, in the hopes of discovering something …