Ashutosh Kumar is a classically trained materials engineer. Having grown up with a passion for making things, he has explored steel design and studied stress fractures in alloys. Throughout Kumar’s education, however, he was also drawn to biology and medicine. When he was accepted into an undergraduate metallurgical engineering and materials science program at Indian…
Imagine a slime-like robot that can seamlessly change its shape to squeeze through narrow spaces, which could be deployed inside the human body to remove an unwanted item. While such a robot does not yet exist outside a laboratory, researchers are working to develop reconfigurable soft robots for applications in health care, wearable devices, and…
Google DeepMind has released an improved version of its biology prediction tool, AlphaFold, that can predict the structures not only of proteins but of nearly all the elements of biological life. It’s a development that could help accelerate drug discovery and other scientific research. The tool is currently being used to experiment with identifying everything…
Multimodality is a relatively new term for something extremely old: how people have learned about the world since humanity appeared. Individuals receive information from myriad sources via their senses, including sight, sound, and touch. Human brains combine these different modes of data into a highly nuanced, holistic picture of reality. “Communication between humans is multimodal,”…
Though generative AI is still a nascent technology, it is already being adopted by teams across companies to unleash new levels of productivity and creativity. Marketers are deploying generative AI to create personalized customer journeys. Designers are using the technology to boost brainstorming and iterate between different content layouts more quickly. The future of technology is exciting,…
Sperm whales are fascinating creatures. They possess the biggest brain of any species, six times larger than a human’s, which scientists believe may have evolved to support intelligent, rational behavior. They’re highly social, capable of making decisions as a group, and they exhibit complex foraging behavior. But there’s also a lot we don’t know about…
How is the field of artificial intelligence evolving and what does it mean for the future of work, education, and humanity? MIT President Sally Kornbluth and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman covered all that and more in a wide-ranging discussion on MIT’s campus May 2. The success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language models has helped spur…
A single photograph offers glimpses into the creator’s world — their interests and feelings about a subject or space. But what about creators behind the technologies that help to make those images possible? MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Associate Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley is one such person, who has designed everything from tools…
The recent ransomware attack on ChangeHealthcare, which severed the network connecting health care providers, pharmacies, and hospitals with health insurance companies, demonstrates just how disruptive supply chain attacks can be. In this case, it hindered the ability of those providing medical services to submit insurance claims and receive payments. This sort of attack and other…
From cutting-edge robotics, design, and bioengineering to sustainable energy solutions, ocean engineering, nanotechnology, and innovative materials science, MechE students and their advisors are doing incredibly innovative work. The graduate students highlighted here represent a snapshot of the great work in progress this spring across the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and demonstrate the ways the future…