Computational neuroscientist and singer/songwriter Kimaya (Kimy) Lecamwasam, who also plays electric bass and guitar, says music has been a core part of her life for as long as she can remember. She grew up in a musical family and played in bands all through high school. “For most of my life, writing and playing music…
MIT Music and Theater Arts fondly remembers the legacy of Professor Emerita Jeanne Shapiro Bamberger, who passed away peacefully at home in Berkeley, California, of natural causes on Dec. 12, 2024 at the age of 100. For three decades at the Institute, Bamberger found ways to use computers to engage students and help them learn music….
This article is part of a series on the Sens-AI Framework—practical habits for learning and coding with AI. AI-assisted coding is here to stay. I’ve seen many companies now require all developers to install Copilot extensions in their IDEs, and teams are increasingly being measured on AI-adoption metrics. Meanwhile, the tools themselves have become genuinely…
Artificial intelligence has always promised speed, efficiency, and new ways of solving problems. But what’s changed in the past few years is how quickly those promises are becoming reality. From oil and gas to retail, logistics to law, AI is no longer confined to pilot projects or speculative labs. It is being deployed in critical…
“Strange was obliged to invent most of the magic he did, working from general principles and half-remembered stories from old books.” — Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Fairy tales, myths, and fantasy fiction are full of magic spells. You say “abracadabra” and something profound happens.1 Say “open sesame” and the door swings open….
Oct. 16 is World Food Day, a global campaign to celebrate the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization 80 years ago, and to work toward a healthy, sustainable, food-secure future. More than 670 million people in the world are facing hunger. Millions of others are facing rising obesity rates and struggle to get healthy…
Manufacturing better batteries, faster electronics, and more effective pharmaceuticals depends on the discovery of new materials and the verification of their quality. Artificial intelligence is helping with the former, with tools that comb through catalogs of materials to quickly tag promising candidates. But once a material is made, verifying its quality still involves scanning it…
As costs for diagnostic and sequencing technologies have plummeted in recent years, researchers have collected an unprecedented amount of data around disease and biology. Unfortunately, scientists hoping to go from data to new cures often require help from someone with experience in software engineering. Now, Watershed Bio is helping scientists and bioinformaticians run experiments and…
In a fascinating op-ed, David Bell, a professor of history at Princeton, argues that “AI is shedding enlightenment values.” As someone who has taught writing at a similarly prestigious university, and as someone who has written about technology for the past 35 or so years, I had a deep response. Bell’s is not the argument…
From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the internet today can be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures—the intellect behind “net neutrality,” a former Meta executive, and the web’s own inventor—propose radical approaches to fixing it. But are these luminaries the right people for the job? Though each shows conviction,…