Machine-learning algorithms are often referred to as a “black box.” Once data are put into an algorithm, it’s not always known exactly how the algorithm arrives at its prediction. This can be particularly frustrating when things go wrong. A new mechanical engineering (MechE) course at MIT teaches students how to tackle the “black box” problem,…
Launched in October of 2020, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology underscores the ways in which industry and technology come together to spur innovation. The five-year initiative aims to achieve its mission through research, education, and fellowships. To that end, Accenture has once again awarded five annual fellowships to MIT graduate…
When Hongzhi Gao was young, he lived with his family in Gansu, a province located in the center of northern China by the Tengger Desert. Thinking back to his childhood, he recalls the constant, steady wind of dirt outside their house, and that during most months of the year it didn’t take more than a…
It’s been a year of supersized AI models. When OpenAI released GPT-3, in June 2020, the neural network’s apparent grasp of language was uncanny. It could generate convincing sentences, converse with humans, and even autocomplete code. GPT-3 was also monstrous in scale—larger than any other neural network ever built. It kicked off a whole new trend in…
New research from MIT neuroscientists suggests that natural soundscapes have shaped our sense of hearing, optimizing it for the kinds of sounds we most often encounter. In a study reported Dec. 14 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers led by McGovern Institute for Brain Research associate investigator Josh McDermott used computational modeling to explore factors…
Cathy Wu is the Gilbert W. Winslow Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a member of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. As an undergraduate, Wu won MIT’s toughest robotics competition, and as a graduate student took the University of California at Berkeley’s first-ever course on deep reinforcement learning. Now back…
As it becomes easier to create hyper-realistic digital characters using artificial intelligence, much of the conversation around these tools has centered on misleading and potentially dangerous deepfake content. But the technology can also be used for positive purposes — to revive Albert Einstein to teach a physics class, talk through a career change with your…
Summary In this developer code pattern, we demonstrate how we can use biometrics to enable a seamless check-in experience for travelers. Interested parties include airlines, airport authorities, and local and federal agencies. At the same time, we enable a means to track travelers by using biometrics, all while sharing data across different agencies at different…
Posted by Karan Singhal, Senior Software Engineer, Google Research Federated learning enables users to train a model without sending raw data to a central server, thus avoiding the collection of privacy-sensitive data. Often this is done by learning a single global model for all users, even though the users may differ in their data distributions….
We’re coming down to the wire with holiday shopping, and many of us are frantically searching online for last-minute stocking stuffers. Luckily, a few new features are coming to Chrome that will make these final rounds of shopping easier — helping you keep track of what you want to buy and finally hit “order.” Here…