Try taking a picture of each of North America’s roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions,…
Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems. That’s according to work presented at a leading machine learning conference in Vancouver last week. Neural networks, from GPT-4 to Stable Diffusion, are built by wiring together perceptrons,…
Whether you’re a fulfillment center, a manufacturer, or a distributor, speed is king. But getting products out the door quickly requires workers to know where those products are located in their warehouses at all times. That may sound obvious, but lost or misplaced inventory is a major problem in warehouses around the world. Corvus Robotics…
Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her leading-edge contributions at the crossroads of behavioral science and artificial intelligence, is MIT’s new visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 academic year. She is the first visiting innovation scholar to be housed within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Polli began her career in…
Business applications powered by AI are revolutionizing customer experiences, accelerating the speed of business, and driving employee productivity. In fact, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan’s 2024 Global State of AI report, 89% of organizations believe AI and machine learning will help them grow revenue, boost operational efficiency, and improve customer experience. Take for…
Crafting a unique and promising research hypothesis is a fundamental skill for any scientist. It can also be time consuming: New PhD candidates might spend the first year of their program trying to decide exactly what to explore in their experiments. What if artificial intelligence could help? MIT researchers have created a way to autonomously…
The electronics industry is approaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto the surface of a computer chip. So, chip manufacturers are looking to build up rather than out. Instead of squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto a single surface, the industry is aiming to stack multiple surfaces of transistors and semiconducting…
AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. But here’s the problem: AI developers and researchers don’t really know much about the sources of the data they are using. AI’s data collection…
A small songbird soars above Ithaca, New York, on a September night. He is one of 4 billion birds, a great annual river of feathered migration across North America. Midair, he lets out what ornithologists call a nocturnal flight call to communicate with his flock. It’s the briefest of signals, barely 50 milliseconds long, emitted…
At an early age, Katie Spivakovsky learned to study the world from different angles. Dinner-table conversations at her family’s home in Menlo Park, California, often leaned toward topics like the Maillard reaction — the chemistry behind food browning — or the fascinating mysteries of prime numbers. Spivakovsky’s parents, one of whom studied physical chemistry and…