MIT’s top research stories of 2024
Stories on tamper-proof ID tags, sound-suppressing silk, and generative AI’s understanding of the world were some of the most popular topics on MIT News.
Helping students bring about decarbonization, from benchtop to global energy marketplace
Professor Jessika Trancik’s course helps students understand energy levers for addressing climate change at the macro and micro scales.
Ecologists find computer vision models’ blind spots in retrieving wildlife images
Biodiversity researchers tested vision systems on how well they could retrieve relevant nature images. More advanced models performed well on simple queries but struggled with more research-specific prompts.
MIT affiliates receive 2025 IEEE honors
Five MIT faculty and staff, along with 19 additional alumni, are honored for electrical engineering and computer science advances.
MIT Schwarzman College of Computing welcomes Frida Polli as visiting innovation scholar
The neuroscientist turned entrepreneur will focus on advancing the intersection of behavioral science and AI across MIT.
How humans continuously adapt while walking stably
Research could help improve motor rehabilitation programs and assistive robot control.
3 Questions: Tracking MIT graduates’ career trajectories
Deborah Liverman, executive director of MIT Career Advising and Professional Development, offers a window into undergraduate and graduate students’ post-graduation paths.
Study reveals AI chatbots can detect race, but racial bias reduces response empathy
Researchers at MIT, NYU, and UCLA develop an approach to help evaluate whether large language models like GPT-4 are equitable enough to be clinically viable for mental health support.
Lara Ozkan named 2025 Marshall Scholar
The MIT senior will pursue graduate studies in the UK at Cambridge University and Imperial College London.
MIT affiliates named 2024 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows
Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni are honored with fellowships to advance research on beneficial AI.
In a unique research collaboration, students make the case for less e-waste
SERC Scholars from around the MIT community examine the electronic hardware waste life cycle and climate justice.
Teaching a robot its limits, to complete open-ended tasks safely
The “PRoC3S” method helps an LLM create a viable action plan by testing each step in a simulation. This strategy could eventually aid in-home robots to complete more ambiguous chore requests.
AI in health should be regulated, but don’t forget about the algorithms, researchers say
In a recent commentary, a team from MIT, Equality AI, and Boston University highlights the gaps in regulation for AI models and non-AI algorithms in health care.
Researchers reduce bias in AI models while preserving or improving accuracy
A new technique identifies and removes the training examples that contribute most to a machine-learning model’s failures.
Enabling AI to explain its predictions in plain language
Using LLMs to convert machine-learning explanations into readable narratives could help users make better decisions about when to trust a model.