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In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the word “viral” has a new resonance, and it’s not necessarily positive. Ruha Benjamin, a scholar who investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology, advocates a shift in perspective. She thinks justice can also be contagious. That’s the premise of Benjamin’s award-winning book “Viral Justice: How…

The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing named Armando Solar-Lezama as the inaugural Distinguished College of Computing Professor, effective July 1.  Solar-Lezama is the first person appointed to this position generously endowed by Professor Jae S. Lim of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Established in the MIT Schwarzman College of…

It’s becoming increasingly clear that courts, not politicians, will be the first to determine the limits on how AI is developed and used in the US. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into whether OpenAI violated consumer protection laws by scraping people’s online data to train its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Meanwhile,…

Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning replay Diffusion models have recently emerged as the de facto standard for generating complex, high-dimensional outputs. You may know them for their ability to produce stunning AI art and hyper-realistic synthetic images, but they have also found success in other applications such as drug design and continuous control. The key…

Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning replay Diffusion models have recently emerged as the de facto standard for generating complex, high-dimensional outputs. You may know them for their ability to produce stunning AI art and hyper-realistic synthetic images, but they have also found success in other applications such as drug design and continuous control. The key…

Your brand new household robot is delivered to your house, and you ask it to make you a cup of coffee. Although it knows some basic skills from previous practice in simulated kitchens, there are way too many actions it could possibly take — turning on the faucet, flushing the toilet, emptying out the flour…

Amid a huge amount of hype around generative AI, a new study from researchers at MIT sheds light on the technology’s impact on work, finding that it increased productivity for workers assigned tasks like writing cover letters, delicate emails, and cost-benefit analyses. The tasks in the study weren’t quite replicas of real work: They didn’t…

AI systems are increasingly everywhere and are becoming more powerful almost by the day. But even as they become ever more ubiquitous and do more, how can we know if a machine is truly “intelligent”? For decades the Turing test defined this question. First proposed in 1950 by the computer scientist Alan Turing, it tried…

Imagine that a team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model that can predict whether a patient has cancer from lung scan images. They want to share this model with hospitals around the world so clinicians can start using it in diagnosis. But there’s a problem. To teach their model how to predict cancer, they…