A strategy for cellular reprogramming involves using targeted genetic interventions to engineer a cell into a new state. The technique holds great promise in immunotherapy, for instance, where researchers could reprogram a patient’s T-cells so they are more potent cancer …
Generative AI, which is currently riding a crest of popular discourse, promises a world where the simple transforms into the complex — where a simple distribution evolves into intricate patterns of images, sounds, or text, rendering the artificial startlingly real. …
Songyee Yoon PhD ’00, an entrepreneur, innovator, investor, and leader in AI and the gaming industry, has been appointed as a School of Engineering visiting innovation scholar for the 2023-24 academic year.
Yoon, who is as a member of the …
The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology has selected five new research fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third year, the initiative underscores the ways in which industry and research can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
Through …
In July, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Provost Cynthia Barnhart issued a call for papers to “articulate effective roadmaps, policy recommendations, and calls for action across the broad domain of generative AI.”
Over the next month, they received an influx …
An age-old adage, often introduced to us during our formative years, is designed to nudge us beyond our self-centered, nascent minds: "Two heads are better than one." This proverb encourages collaborative thinking and highlights the potency of shared intellect.
Fast …
As 3D printers have become cheaper and more widely accessible, a rapidly growing community of novice makers are fabricating their own objects. To do this, many of these amateur artisans access free, open-source repositories of user-generated 3D models that they …
It can be a hassle to get to the doctor’s office. And the task can be especially challenging for parents of children with motor disorders such as cerebral palsy, as a clinician must evaluate the child in person on a …
The classic computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out” lacks nuance when it comes to understanding biased medical data, argue computer science and bioethics professors from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and the Alan Turing Institute in a new opinion piece …
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 …
Powerful machine-learning algorithms known as vision and language models, which learn to match text with images, have shown remarkable results when asked to generate captions or summarize videos.
While these models excel at identifying objects, they often struggle to understand …
An autonomous vehicle must rapidly and accurately recognize objects that it encounters, from an idling delivery truck parked at the corner to a cyclist whizzing toward an approaching intersection.
To do this, the vehicle might use a powerful computer vision …
Computing is at an inflection point. Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an electronic chip will double each year, is slowing down due to the physical limits of fitting more transistors on affordable microchips. These increases …
“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 …
As the impacts of climate change continue to grow, so does interest in fusion’s potential as a clean energy source. While fusion reactions have been studied in laboratories since the 1930s, there are still many critical questions scientists must answer …
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 …
Should artificial intelligence be allowed to make care decisions for patients? Though the future of AI may conjure up doomsday visions of robots and computers intent on rendering human existence superfluous, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning …
The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology has selected three new research projects that will receive support from the initiative. The research projects aim to accelerate progress in meeting complex societal needs through new business convergence insights …
Imagine you want to carry a large, heavy box up a flight of stairs. You might spread your fingers out and lift that box with both hands, then hold it on top of your forearms and balance it against your …