Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas. A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that…
Imagine using artificial intelligence to compare two seemingly unrelated creations — biological tissue and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9.” At first glance, a living system and a musical masterpiece might appear to have no connection. However, a novel AI method developed by Markus J. Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental…
The process of computational design in mechanical engineering often begins with a problem or a goal, followed by an assessment of literature, resources, and systems available to address the issue. The Design Computation and Digital Engineering (DeCoDE) Lab at MIT instead explores the bounds of what is possible. Working with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab,…
Between vacation, end-of-year projects, the coming holidays, and other hysteria, I haven’t come up with an article this month. So here’s a quick list of things that have amazed me recently. Are we virtual yet? I’m far from the first person to find NotebookLM amazing, and I certainly won’t be the last. I did a…
<!– We introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by generating and utilizing naturalistic backstories with rich details of individual values and experience. –> We introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by generating and utilizing naturalistic backstories with rich details…
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology. But it’s high…
Kessel Okinga-Koumu paced around a crowded hallway. It was her first time presenting at the Deep Learning Indaba, she told the crowd gathered to hear her, filled with researchers from Africa’s machine-learning community. The annual weeklong conference (‘Indaba’ is a Zulu word for gathering), was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University…
By studying changes in gene expression, researchers learn how cells function at a molecular level, which could help them understand the development of certain diseases. But a human has about 20,000 genes that can affect each other in complex ways, so even knowing which groups of genes to target is an enormously complicated problem. Also,…
When Nikola Tesla predicted we’d have handheld phones that could display videos, photographs, and more, his musings seemed like a distant dream. Nearly 100 years later, smartphones are like an extra appendage for many of us. Digital fabrication engineers are now working toward expanding the display capabilities of other everyday objects. One avenue they’re exploring is…