Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact
Rapid development and deployment of powerful generative AI models comes with environmental consequences, including increased electricity demand and water consumption.
Algorithms and AI for a better world
Assistant Professor Manish Raghavan wants computational techniques to help solve societal problems.
Minimizing the carbon footprint of bridges and other structures
MAD Design Fellow Zane Schemmer writes algorithms that optimize overall function, minimize carbon footprint, and produce a manufacturable design.
Teaching AI to communicate sounds like humans do
Inspired by the human vocal tract, a new AI model can produce and understand vocal imitations of everyday sounds. The method could help build new sonic interfaces for entertainment and education.
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.
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.
Surface-based sonar system could rapidly map the ocean floor at high resolution
A small fleet of autonomous surface vessels forms a large sonar array for finding submerged objects.
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.
AI in health should be regulated, but don’t forget about the algorithms, researchers say
In a recent commentary, a team from MIT, Equality AI, and Boston University highlights the gaps in regulation for AI models and non-AI algorithms in health care.
Daniela Rus wins John Scott Award
MIT CSAIL director and EECS professor named a co-recipient of the honor for her robotics research, which has expanded our understanding of what a robot can be.
Citation tool offers a new approach to trustworthy AI-generated content
Researchers develop “ContextCite,” an innovative method to track AI’s source attribution and detect potential misinformation.
A new way to create realistic 3D shapes using generative AI
Researchers propose a simple fix to an existing technique that could help artists, designers, and engineers create better 3D models.
MIT researchers develop an efficient way to train more reliable AI agents
The technique could make AI systems better at complex tasks that involve variability.
Advancing urban tree monitoring with AI-powered digital twins
The Tree-D Fusion system integrates generative AI and genus-conditioned algorithms to create precise simulation-ready models of 600,000 existing urban trees across North America.
3 Questions: Inverting the problem of design
MIT and IBM researchers are creating linkage mechanisms to innovate human-AI kinematic engineering.