Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place. The company seeks to minimize costs while meeting a 23 percent increase in demand. Wouldn’t it be easier for the company to just ask ChatGPT to come up with an optimal plan? In fact, for all their incredible capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often perform […]

On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with the bot.  I was surprised by those results, which you can read about in my full story. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that an AI model trained to provide therapy is the solution for millions of people experiencing a mental health crisis. How could a bot mimic the expertise of a trained therapist? And what […]

Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Fluid Interfaces research group within the MIT Media Lab, has been awarded the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. She will accept the award at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan this April. The Lifetime Research Award is given to individuals whose research in human-computer interaction (HCI) is considered both fundamental and influential to the field. Recipients are selected based on their cumulative contributions, influence on the work of others, new research developments, and being an active participant in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human […]