Cancer Grand Challenges recently announced five winning teams for 2024, which included five researchers from MIT: Michael Birnbaum, Regina Barzilay, Brandon DeKosky, Seychelle Vos, and Ömer Yilmaz. Each team is made up of interdisciplinary cancer researchers from across the globe and will be awarded $25 million over five years. Birnbaum, an associate professor in the…
If you’ve watched Boston Dynamics’ slick videos of robots running, jumping and doing parkour, you might have the impression robots have learned to be amazingly agile. In fact, these robots are still coded by hand, and would struggle to deal with new obstacles they haven’t encountered before. However, a new method of teaching robots to…
Audio deepfakes have had a recent bout of bad press after an artificial intelligence-generated robocall purporting to be the voice of Joe Biden hit up New Hampshire residents, urging them not to cast ballots. Meanwhile, spear-phishers — phishing campaigns that target a specific person or group, especially using information known to be of interest to…
Posted by Mike Schaekermann, Research Scientist, Google Research, and Ivor Horn, Chief Health Equity Officer & Director, Google Core Health equity is a major societal concern worldwide with disparities having many causes. These sources include limitations in access to healthcare, differences in clinical treatment, and even fundamental differences in the diagnostic technology. In dermatology for…
Self-driving company Waabi is using a generative AI model to help predict the movement of vehicles, it announced today. The new system, called Copilot4D, was trained on troves of data from lidar sensors, which use light to sense how far away objects are. If you prompt the model with a situation, like a driver recklessly…
Posted by Yun Zhu and Lijuan Liu, Software Engineers, Google Research Large language model (LLM) advancements have led to a new paradigm that unifies various natural language processing (NLP) tasks within an instruction-following framework. This paradigm is exemplified by recent multi-task LLMs, such as T0, FLAN, and OPT-IML. First, multi-task data is gathered with each…
Fly, goat, fly! A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before such as Goat Simulator 3, a fun action game with exaggerated physics. Researchers were able to get it to follow text commands to play seven different games and move around in three different 3D…
Posted by Bahare Fatemi, Research Scientist, Google Research, and Bryan Perozzi, Research Scientist, Google Research Imagine all the things around you — your friends, tools in your kitchen, or even the parts of your bike. They are all connected in different ways. In computer science, the term graph is used to describe connections between objects….
I’ve had a ham radio license since the late 1960s and observed the transition from vacuum tubes (remember them?) to transistors firsthand. Because we’re allowed to operate high power transmitters (1500 watt output), tubes hang on in our world a lot longer than elsewhere. There’s a good reason: tubes are ideal high power devices for…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I remember the first time I tried on a VR headset. It was the first Oculus Rift, and I nearly fainted after experiencing an intense but visually clumsy VR roller-coaster. But…