By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor Advancing trustworthy AI and machine learning to mitigate agency risk is a priority for the US Department of Energy (DOE), and identifying best practices for implementing AI at scale is a priority for the US General Services Administration (GSA). That’s what attendees learned in two sessions at the AI…
The demand for computing-related training is at an all-time high. At MIT, there has been a remarkable tide of interest in computer science programs, with heavy enrollment from students studying everything from economics to life sciences eager to learn how computational techniques and methodologies can be used and applied within their primary field. Launched in…
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in seven children in the United States experienced abuse or neglect in the past year. Child protective services agencies around the nation receive a high number of reports each year (about 4.4 million in 2019) of alleged neglect or abuse. With so many cases,…
In the past few years, artificial intelligence models of language have become very good at certain tasks. Most notably, they excel at predicting the next word in a string of text; this technology helps search engines and texting apps predict the next word you are going to type. The most recent generation of predictive language…
If you don’t get seasick, an autonomous boat might be the right mode of transportation for you. Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Laboratory, together with Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) in the Netherlands, have now created the final project in their self-navigating trilogy:…
Automated speech-recognition technology has become more common with the popularity of virtual assistants like Siri, but many of these systems only perform well with the most widely spoken of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages. Because these systems largely don’t exist for less common languages, the millions of people who speak them are cut off from…
Bilge Yildiz’s research impacts a wide range of technologies. The members of her lab study fuel cells, which convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity (and water). They study electrolyzers, which go the other way, using electricity to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen. They study batteries. They study corrosion. They even study computers that attempt…
In the 1960s, the advent of computer-aided design (CAD) sparked a revolution in design. For his PhD thesis in 1963, MIT Professor Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a game-changing software program that enabled users to draw, move, and resize shapes on a computer. Over the course of the next few decades, CAD software reshaped how everything…
Nine technologies developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have been selected as R&D 100 Award winners for 2021. Since 1963, this awards program has recognized the 100 most significant technologies transitioned to use or introduced into the marketplace over the past year. The winners are selected by an independent panel of expert judges. R&D World, an…
When the cloud storage firm Dropbox decided to shut down its offices with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, co-founder and CEO Drew Houston ’05 had to send the company’s nearly 3,000 employees home and tell them they were not coming back to work anytime soon. “It felt like I was announcing a snow day or…