Talking with retail executives back in 2010, Rama Ramakrishnan came to two realizations. First, although retail systems that offered customers personalized recommendations were getting a great deal of attention, these systems often provided little payoff for retailers. Second, for many …
Talking with retail executives back in 2010, Rama Ramakrishnan came to two realizations. First, although retail systems that offered customers personalized recommendations were getting a great deal of attention, these systems often provided little payoff for retailers. Second, for many …
An accomplished MIT student researcher in health care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his name, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he chose his path.
“I kind of fell into it,” the mechanical engineering PhD candidate …
“As a child, I wished for a robot that would explain others’ emotions to me” says Sharifa Alghowinem, a research scientist in the Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group (PRG). Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Alghowinem says she dreamed of coming …
After three years leading biking tours through U.S. National Parks, Jackson Jewett decided it was time for a change.
“It was a lot of fun, but I realized I missed buildings,” says Jewett. “I really wanted to be a part …
MIT Professor Jonathan How’s research interests span the gamut of autonomous vehicles — from airplanes and spacecraft to unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) and cars. He is particularly focused on the design and implementation of distributed robust planning algorithms …
Data, and more specifically using data, is not a new concept, but it remains an elusive one. It comes with terms like “the internet of things” (IoT) and “the cloud,” and no matter how often those are explained, smart people …
When Cindy Heredia was choosing an MBA program, she knew she wanted to be at the forefront of the autonomous driving industry. While doing research, she discovered that MIT had a unique offering: a student-run driverless team. Heredia applied to …
A three-year recipient of MIT’s Emerson Classical Vocal Scholarships, senior Ananya Gurumurthy recalls getting ready to step onto the Carnegie Hall stage to sing a Mozart opera that she once sang with the New York All-State Choir. The choir conductor …
Medical researchers are awash in a tsunami of clinical data. But we need major changes in how we gather, share, and apply this data to bring its benefits to all, says Leo Anthony Celi, principal research scientist at the MIT …
After more than two decades as part of Amazon’s core leadership team, Jeff Wilke helped transform the way people buy almost everything. His next act is no less ambitious: proving that America can make just about anything.
In March 2021, …
Brian Nord first fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Wisconsin. His high school physics program wasn’t exceptional, and he sometimes struggled to keep up with class material, but those difficulties did nothing to …
“MIT is a place where dreams come true,” says César Terrer, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Here at MIT, Terrer says he’s given the resources needed to explore ideas he finds most exciting, and …
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, …
How does an ensemble play music together while apart? This was the question facing Frederick Ajisafe and the rest of the MIT Wind Ensemble (MITWE) at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. One method was to individually record tracks that …
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 …
Koroush Shirvan, the John Clark Hardwick Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), knows that the nuclear industry has traditionally been wary of innovations until they are shown to have proven utility. As a result, …
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 …
Juncal Arbelaiz Mugica is a native of Spain, where octopus is a common menu item. However, Arbelaiz appreciates octopus and similar creatures in a different way, with her research into soft-robotics theory.
More than half of an octopus’ nerves are …