MIT’s top research stories of 2024
Stories on tamper-proof ID tags, sound-suppressing silk, and generative AI’s understanding of the world were some of the most popular topics on MIT News.
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MIT community in 2024: A year in review
Top stories highlighted the Climate Project at MIT and two new Institute collaborative projects; free tuition for most new undergraduates; Nobels and other major awards; a solar eclipse over campus; and more.
Ecologists find computer vision models’ blind spots in retrieving wildlife images
Biodiversity researchers tested vision systems on how well they could retrieve relevant nature images. More advanced models performed well on simple queries but struggled with more research-specific prompts.
Startup’s autonomous drones precisely track warehouse inventories
Corvus Robotics, founded by Mohammed Kabir ’21, is using drones that can navigate in GPS-denied environments to expedite inventory management.
MIT affiliates receive 2025 IEEE honors
Five MIT faculty and staff, along with 19 additional alumni, are honored for electrical engineering and computer science advances.
MIT Schwarzman College of Computing welcomes Frida Polli as visiting innovation scholar
The neuroscientist turned entrepreneur will focus on advancing the intersection of behavioral science and AI across MIT.
Need a research hypothesis? Ask AI.
MIT engineers developed AI frameworks to identify evidence-driven hypotheses that could advance biologically inspired materials.
MIT engineers grow “high-rise” 3D chips
An electronic stacking technique could exponentially increase the number of transistors on chips, enabling more efficient AI hardware.
3 Questions: Tracking MIT graduates’ career trajectories
Deborah Liverman, executive director of MIT Career Advising and Professional Development, offers a window into undergraduate and graduate students’ post-graduation paths.
MIT researchers introduce Boltz-1, a fully open-source model for predicting biomolecular structures
With models like AlphaFold3 limited to academic research, the team built an equivalent alternative, to encourage innovation more broadly.
Study reveals AI chatbots can detect race, but racial bias reduces response empathy
Researchers at MIT, NYU, and UCLA develop an approach to help evaluate whether large language models like GPT-4 are equitable enough to be clinically viable for mental health support.
Lara Ozkan named 2025 Marshall Scholar
The MIT senior will pursue graduate studies in the UK at Cambridge University and Imperial College London.
MIT affiliates named 2024 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows
Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni are honored with fellowships to advance research on beneficial AI.
In a unique research collaboration, students make the case for less e-waste
SERC Scholars from around the MIT community examine the electronic hardware waste life cycle and climate justice.
Teaching a robot its limits, to complete open-ended tasks safely
The “PRoC3S” method helps an LLM create a viable action plan by testing each step in a simulation. This strategy could eventually aid in-home robots to complete more ambiguous chore requests.