Understanding viral justice
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the word “viral” has a new resonance, and it’s not necessarily positive. Ruha Benjamin, a scholar who investigates the social dimensions of science,…
Artificial Intelligence
Armando Solar-Lezama named inaugural Distinguished College of Computing Professor
The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing named Armando Solar-Lezama as the inaugural Distinguished College of Computing Professor, effective July 1. Solar-Lezama is the first person appointed to this…
AI helps household robots cut planning time in half
Your brand new household robot is delivered to your house, and you ask it to make you a cup of coffee. Although it knows some basic skills from previous practice…
Study finds ChatGPT boosts worker productivity for some writing tasks
Amid a huge amount of hype around generative AI, a new study from researchers at MIT sheds light on the technology’s impact on work, finding that it increased productivity for…
A new way to look at data privacy
Imagine that a team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model that can predict whether a patient has cancer from lung scan images. They want to share this model with…
Making sense of all things data
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,”…
How an “AI-tocracy” emerges
Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. Such governments can fail to keep up with technological changes that…
Generative AI imagines new protein structures
Biology is a wondrous yet delicate tapestry. At the heart is DNA, the master weaver that encodes proteins, responsible for orchestrating the many biological functions that sustain life within the…
3 Questions: Honing robot perception and mapping
Walking to a friend’s house or browsing the aisles of a grocery store might feel like simple tasks, but they in fact require sophisticated capabilities. That's because humans are able…
Learning the language of molecules to predict their properties
Discovering new materials and drugs typically involves a manual, trial-and-error process that can take decades and cost millions of dollars. To streamline this process, scientists often use machine learning to…