Submit a proposal for a talk at our new virtual conference, Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It. Proposals must be submitted by March 5; the conference will take place April 24, 2025, from 11AM to 3PM EDT. When tools like GitHub Copilot first appeared, it was received wisdom that AI…
We often take the internet for granted. It’s an ocean of information at our fingertips—and it simply works. But this system relies on swarms of “crawlers”—bots that roam the web, visit millions of websites every day, and report what they see. This is how Google powers its search engines, how Amazon sets competitive prices, and…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. No tech leader before has played the role in a new presidential administration that Elon Musk is playing now. Under his leadership, DOGE has entered offices in a half-dozen agencies and counting,…
Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into solving some of the world’s toughest challenges started with a simple love for puzzles. By high school, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to computer science. Through her participation in an entrepreneurship and leadership program, she built apps and twice made it to the semifinals of the program’s global competition….
The ancient Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle once concluded that the human heart is tri-chambered and that it was the single most important organ in the entire body, governing motion, sensation, and thought. Today, we know that the human heart actually has four chambers and that the brain largely controls motion, sensation, and thought. But…
Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government. The payment reports have been…
A lot has changed in the 15 years since Kaiming He was a PhD student. “When you are in your PhD stage, there is a high wall between different disciplines and subjects, and there was even a high wall within computer science,” He says. “The guy sitting next to me could be doing things that…
Should you grab your umbrella before you walk out the door? Checking the weather forecast beforehand will only be helpful if that forecast is accurate. Spatial prediction problems, like weather forecasting or air pollution estimation, involve predicting the value of a variable in a new location based on known values at other locations. Scientists typically…
Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery…
There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They…