MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

Undergraduate student Isabella Struckman and Sofie Kupiec ’23 reached out to the first hundred signatories of the Future of Life Institute’s open letting calling for a pause on AI development to learn more about their motivations and concerns, reports Will Knight for Wired. “The duo’s write-up of their findings reveals a broad array of perspectives among those who put their name to the document,” writes Knight. “Despite the letter’s public reception, relatively few were actually worried about AI posing a looming threat to humanity.”

MIT researchers have developed a new tool called “PhotoGuard” that can help protect images from AI manipulation, reports Ross Cristantiello for Boston.com. The tool “is designed to make real images resistant to advanced models that can generate new images, such as DALL-E and Midjourney,” writes Cristantiello.

Researchers at MIT have developed “PhotoGuard,” a tool that can be used to protect images from AI manipulation, reports Catherine Thorbecke for CNN. The tool “puts an invisible ‘immunization’ over images that stops AI models from being able to manipulate the picture,” writes Thorbecke.

Researchers at MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have published a paper showcasing the development of OncoNPC, an artificial intelligence model that can predict where a patient’s cancer came from in their body, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. This information “can help determine more effective treatment decisions for patients and caregivers,” writes Tran.

Studies by researchers at MIT have found “that shifting to electric vehicles delivers a 30% to 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over combustion vehicles,” reports Tom Krisher for Associated Press. According to Prof. Jessika Trancik, “electric vehicles are cleaner over their lifetimes, even after taking into account the pollution caused by the mining of metals for batteries,” writes Krisher.

At CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus Bob Metcalfe '69 showcased how the many individual bits of innovation that emerged from the Telnet Protocol later become the foundation for email, writes Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, for Forbes. “Looking ahead to the future of connectivity, Metcalfe spoke of the challenges of limited network bandwidth, and the importance of keeping connectivity firmly in mind when developing any new computing technologies,” writes Rus.

At CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, Prof. Stefanie Jegelka’s presentation provided insight into “the failures and successes of neural networks and explored some crucial context that can help engineers and other human observers to focus in on how learning is happening,” reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes.

Prof. Jacob Andreas explored the concept of language guided program synthesis at CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes. “Language is a tool,” said Andreas during his talk. “Not just for training models, but actually interpreting them and sometimes improving them directly, again, in domains, not just involving languages (or) inputs, but also these kinds of visual domains as well.”

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, writes for Forbes about Prof. Dina Katabi’s work using insights from wireless systems to help glean information about patient health. “Incorporating continuous time data collection in healthcare using ambient WiFi detectable by machine learning promises an era where early and accurate diagnosis becomes the norm rather than the exception,” writes Rus.

Researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed “Sybil,” an AI tool that can detect the risk of a patient developing lung cancer within six years, reports Mary Kekatos for ABC News. “Sybil was trained on low-dose chest computer tomography scans, which is recommended for those between ages 50 and 80 who either have a significant history of smoking or currently smoke,” explains Kekatos.

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, emphasizes the central role universities play in fostering innovation and the importance of ensuring universities have the computing resources necessary to help tackle major global challenges. Rus writes, “academia needs a large-scale research cloud that allows researchers to efficiently share resources” to address hot-button issues like generative AI. “It would provide an integrated platform for large-scale data management, encourage collaborative studies across research organizations, and offer access to cutting-edge technologies, while ensuring cost efficiency,” Rus explains.

Writing for Forbes, research affiliate John Werner spotlights Prof. Stefanie Mueller’s presentation at the CSAIL Imagination in Action event on her work developing a new type of paint that allows users to change the color and pattern of different objects. “The long-term vision here, really, is to give those physical objects the same capabilities as we have in digital,” said Mueller. “I hope in the future we will all get some free stuff, and we would just have an [app] where we can download different textures we can apply, and change our outfits.”

During her talk at CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, explored the promise of using liquid neural networks “to solve some of AI’s notorious complexity problems,” writes research affiliate John Werner for Forbes. “Liquid networks are a new model for machine learning,” said Rus. “They're compact, interpretable and causal. And they have shown great promise in generalization under heavy distribution shifts.”

In an article for Forbes, research affiliate John Werner spotlights Prof. Dina Katabi and her work showcasing how AI can boost the capabilities of clinical data. “We are going to collect data, clinical data from patients continuously in their homes, track the symptoms, the evolution of those symptoms, and process this data with machine learning so that we can get insights before problems occur,” says Katabi.

Researchers from MIT have found that since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a decrease in the number of interactions between people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, reports Danny Westneat for The Seattle Times. “It’s creating an urban fabric that is actually more brittle, in the sense that we are less exposed to other people,” says research scientist Esteban Moro. “We don’t get to know other people in the city … to know other people’s needs. If we don’t see them around the city, that will be impossible.”