Latest from MIT : A data designer driven to collaborate with communities

It is fairly common in public discourse for someone to announce, “I brought data to this discussion,” thus casting their own conclusions as empirical and rational. It is less common to ask: Where did the data come from? How was it collected? Why is there data about some things but not others? MIT Associate Professor…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own

Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion. The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs)…

O’Reilly Media – Educating a New Generation of Workers

There is a crisis in technical education. The golden road to a career has always been through a college education. However, this “golden road” has developed deep cracks and is badly in need of maintenance. Postsecondary education is rapidly becoming unaffordable, even at public colleges and universities. Tuition has risen at a rate 50% greater…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – The way we measure progress in AI is terrible

Every time a new AI model is released, it’s typically touted as acing its performance against a series of benchmarks. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, for example, was launched in May with a compilation of results that showed its performance topping every other AI company’s latest model in several tests. The problem is that these benchmarks are poorly…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – We need to start wrestling with the ethics of AI agents

Generative AI models have become remarkably good at conversing with us, and creating images, videos, and music for us, but they’re not all that good at doing things for us.  AI agents promise to change that. Think of them as AI models with a script and a purpose. They tend to come in one of…

Latest from MIT : Improving health, one machine learning system at a time

Captivated as a child by video games and puzzles, Marzyeh Ghassemi was also fascinated at an early age in health. Luckily, she found a path where she could combine the two interests.  “Although I had considered a career in health care, the pull of computer science and engineering was stronger,” says Ghassemi, an associate professor in…

Latest from MIT : New AI tool generates realistic satellite images of future flooding

Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate. MIT scientists have developed a method that generates satellite imagery from the future to depict how a region would look after a potential flooding event. The method combines a generative artificial intelligence model…

Latest from MIT : Building an understanding of how drivers interact with emerging vehicle technologies

As the global conversation around assisted and automated vehicles (AVs) evolves, the MIT Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium continues to lead cutting-edge research aimed at understanding how drivers interact with emerging vehicle technologies.  Since its launch in 2015, the AVT Consortium — a global academic-industry collaboration on developing a data-driven understanding of how drivers respond…

Latest from MIT : A vision for U.S. science success

White House science advisor Arati Prabhakar expressed confidence in U.S. science and technology capacities during a talk on Wednesday about major issues the country must tackle. “Let me start with the purpose of science and technology and innovation, which is to open possibilities so that we can achieve our great aspirations,” said Prabhakar, who is…