Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with The Economist about how AI can help advance medicine in areas such as uncovering new drugs. With AI, “the type of questions that we will be asking will be very different from what we’re asking today,” says Barzilay.
A new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how “machine-learning systems designed to spot someone breaking a policy rule—a dress code, for example—will be harsher or more lenient depending on minuscule-seeming differences in how humans annotated data that were used to train the system,” reports Ananya for Scientific American. “This is an important warning for a field where datasets are often used without close examination of labeling practices, and [it] underscores the need for caution in automated decision systems—particularly in contexts where compliance with societal rules is essential,” says Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi.
Popular Science reporter Andrew Paul writes that MIT researchers have developed a new long-range, low-power underwater communication system. Installing underwater communication networks “could help continuously measure a variety of oceanic datasets such as pressure, CO2, and temperature to refine climate change modeling,” writes Paul, “as well as analyze the efficacy of certain carbon capture technologies.”
In the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking, MIT has been honored as one of the best colleges in the United States, reports Emily Sweeney for The Boston Globe. This year’s ranking put a new emphasis “on student outcomes, such as graduation rates and graduate salaries,” explains Sweeney.
MIT has been named one of the top colleges in America in the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking, report Kevin McAllister and Tom Corrigan for The Wall Street Journal. “The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking emphasizes how much a college improves its students’ chances of graduating on time, and how much it boosts the salaries they earn after graduation,” explain McAllister and Corrigan.
MIT has been named one of America’s Top Colleges in Forbes’ annual roundup, reports Emma Whitford and Janet Novack for Forbes. The annual list “showcases 500 of the finest U.S. colleges, ranked using data on student success, return on investment and alumni influence,” explain Whitford and Novack.
Forbes reporter Rob Toews spotlights Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, and research affiliate Ramin Hasani and their work with liquid neural networks. “The ‘liquid’ in the name refers to the fact that the model’s weights are probabilistic rather than constant, allowing them to vary fluidly depending on the inputs the model is exposed to,” writes Toews.
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have used artificial intelligence to develop a new antibiotic to combat Acinetobacter baumannii, a challenging bacteria known to become resistant to antibiotics, reports Hannah Kuchler for the Financial Times. “It took just an hour and a half — a long lunch — for the AI to serve up a potential new antibiotic, an offering to a world contending with the rise of so-called superbugs: bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites that have mutated and no longer respond to the drugs we have available,” writes Kuchler.
Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Boston Globe reporter Aruni Soni about her new study that finds reducing the cost of solar energy will be accelerated by improvements in soft tech. “We found that the soft technology involved in solar energy really has not changed and hasn’t improved nearly as quickly as the hardware,” says Trancik. “These soft costs, in many systems, can be 50 percent or even more of the total cost of solar electricity.”
Using techniques inspired by kirigami, a Japanese paper-cutting technique, MIT researchers have developed a “a novel method to manufacture plate lattices – high performance materials useful in automotive and aerospace designs,” reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “The kirigami-augmented plate lattices withstood three times as much force as standard aluminum corrugation designs,” writes Paul. “Such variations show immense promise for lightweight, shock-absorbing sections needed within cars, planes, and spacecraft."
Prof. Yoon Kim speaks with Popular Science reporter Charlotte Hu about how large language models like ChatGPT operate. “You can think of [chatbots] as algorithms with little knobs on them,” says Kim. “These knobs basically learn on data that you see out in the wild,” allowing the software to create “probabilities over the entire English vocab.”
Graduate students Martin Nisser and Marisa Gaetz co-founded Brave Behind Bars, a program designed to provide incarcerated individuals with coding and digital literacy skills to better prepare them for life after prison, reports Morgan Radford for MSNBC. Computers and coding skills “are really kind of paramount for fostering success in the modern workplace,” says Nisser.
Principal Research Scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni speaks with Fast Company reporter Sam Becker about his work in developing the Synthetic Data Vault, which is helpful for creating synthetic data sets, reports Sam Becker for Fast Company. “Fake data is randomly generated,” says Veeramachaneni. “While synthetic data is trying to create data from a machine learning model that looks very realistic.”
Researchers from MIT and Harvard have explored astrocytes, a group of brain cells, from a computational perspective and developed a mathematical model that shows how they can be used to build a biological transformer, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “The brain is far superior to even the best artificial neural networks that we have developed, but we don’t really know exactly how the brain works,” says research staff member Dmitry Krotov. “There is scientific value in thinking about connections between biological hardware and large-scale artificial intelligence networks. This is neuroscience for AI and AI for neuroscience.
Prof. D. Fox Harrell writes for The Guardian about the importance of ensuring AI systems are designed to “reflect the ethically positive culture we truly want.” Harrell emphasizes that: “We need to be aware of, and thoughtfully design, the cultural values that AI is based on. With care, we can build systems based on multiple worldviews – and address key ethical issues in design such as transparency and intelligibility."