In a letter to the MIT community today, Vice President for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma announced the appointment of Professor Cynthia Breazeal as dean for digital learning, effective Feb. 1. As dean, she will supervise numerous business units and research initiatives centered on developing and deploying digital technologies for learning. These include MIT xPRO, Bootcamps,…
Posted by Sergio Orts Escolano and Jana Ehman, Software Engineers, Google Research Image matting is the process of extracting a precise alpha matte that separates foreground and background objects in an image. This technique has been traditionally used in the filmmaking and photography industry for image and video editing purposes, e.g., background replacement, synthetic bokeh…
Much of Anuradha Annaswamy’s research hinges on uncertainty. How does cloudy weather affect a grid powered by solar energy? How do we ensure that electricity is delivered to the consumer if a grid is powered by wind and the wind does not blow? What’s the best course of action if a bird hits a plane…
Posted by Tom Denton, Software Engineer and Scott Wisdom, Research Scientist, Google Research Birds are all around us, and just by listening, we can learn many things about our environment. Ecologists use birds to understand food systems and forest health — for example, if there are more woodpeckers in a forest, that means there’s a…
Posted by Heng-Tze Cheng, Senior Staff Software Engineer and Romal Thoppilan, Senior Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team Language models are becoming more capable than ever before and are helpful in a variety of tasks — translating one language into another, summarizing a long document into a brief highlight, or answering information-seeking questions. Among these,…
There are few environments as unforgiving as the ocean. Its unpredictable weather patterns and limitations in terms of communications have left large swaths of the ocean unexplored and shrouded in mystery. “The ocean is a fascinating environment with a number of current challenges like microplastics, algae blooms, coral bleaching, and rising temperatures,” says Wim van…
While mammograms are currently the gold standard in breast cancer screening, swirls of controversy exist regarding when and how often they should be administered. On the one hand, advocates argue for the ability to save lives: Women aged 60-69 who receive mammograms, for example, have a 33 percent lower risk of dying compared to those…
In the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a roiling, trillion-degree plasma of quarks and gluons — elementary particles that briefly glommed together in countless combinations before cooling and settling into more stable configurations to make the neutrons and protons of ordinary matter. In the chaos before cooling, a…
If you can recognize a dog by sight, then you can probably recognize a dog when it is described to you in words. Not so for today’s artificial intelligence. Deep neural networks have become very good at identifying objects in photos and conversing in natural language, but not at the same time: there are AI…
Artificial intelligence helps build physical infrastructure like modular housing, skyscrapers, and factory floors. “…many problems that we wrestle with in all forms of engineering and design are very, very complex problems…those problems are beginning to reach the limits of human capacity,” says Mike Haley, the vice president of research at Autodesk. But there’s hope with…