The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory had a special guest last week. Cancer patient Alexander Clark, 13, visited from his Harrisburg, PA home with the help of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, which grants the wishes of children with terminal or life-threatening illnesses. Alexander's wish was to meet Rodney Brooks, director of the AI Lab; his robot Cog; and Cog's younger sibling Kismet (a project of graduate student Cynthia Breazeal), with whom Alexander (above) plays blocks. Photo / Donna Coveney
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 8, 1999.
The former EECS professor and RLE affiliate helped to develop a machine that read text out loud and won an Emmy for work on subtly speeding up film and audio without a noticeable loss of pitch.
Three neurosymbolic methods help language models find better abstractions within natural language, then use those representations to execute complex tasks.