Nearly 90% of the multibillion-dollar federal lobbying apparatus in the United States serves corporate interests. In some cases, the objective of that money is obvious. Google pours millions into lobbying on bills related to antitrust regulation. Big energy companies expect action whenever there is a move to end drilling leases for federal lands, in exchange…
Swift and significant gains against climate change require the creation of novel, environmentally benign, and energy-efficient materials. One of the richest veins researchers hope to tap in creating such useful compounds is a vast chemical space where molecular combinations that offer remarkable optical, conductive, magnetic, and heat transfer properties await discovery. But finding these new…
Hashing is a core operation in most online databases, like a library catalogue or an e-commerce website. A hash function generates codes that replace data inputs. Since these codes are shorter than the actual data, and usually a fixed length, this makes it easier to find and retrieve the original information. However, because traditional hash…
Posted by Danny Driess, Student Researcher, and Pete Florence, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google Recent years have seen tremendous advances across machine learning domains, from models that can explain jokes or answer visual questions in a variety of languages to those that can produce images based on text descriptions. Such innovations have been possible due…
Government should not “abdicate” its responsibilities and leave the future path of artificial intelligence solely to Big Tech, Aleksander Mądry, the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Computing at MIT and director of the MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning, told a Congressional panel on Wednesday. Rather, Mądry said, government should be asking questions about the…
Meredith Broussard is unusually well placed to dissect the ongoing hype around AI. She’s a data scientist and associate professor at New York University, and she’s been one of the leading researchers in the field of algorithmic bias for years. And though her own work leaves her buried in math problems, she’s spent the last…
Matthew Kearney was drawn to MIT by the culture of its cross-country team. Growing up in Austin, Texas, he loved spending time outdoors and playing soccer, but by high school running had become his primary sport. While looking at colleges, he wanted to find a place with both strong academics and a strong team community….
Posted by Tom Denton, Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team Worldwide bird populations are declining at an alarming rate, with approximately 48% of existing bird species known or suspected to be experiencing population declines. For instance, the U.S. and Canada have reported 29% fewer birds since 1970. Effective monitoring of bird populations is essential for…
One of the 12 labors of Hercules, according to ancient lore, was to destroy a nine-headed monster called the Hydra. The challenge was that when Hercules used his sword to chop off one of the monster’s heads, two would grow back in its place. He therefore needed an additional weapon, a torch, to vanquish his…
A new study from researchers at MIT and Brown University characterizes several properties that emerge during the training of deep classifiers, a type of artificial neural network commonly used for classification tasks such as image classification, speech recognition, and natural language processing. The paper, “Dynamics in Deep Classifiers trained with the Square Loss: Normalization, Low…