Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of autonomous drone that uses advanced neural networks to fly, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. “The new design allows the drone to make better decisions when flying through completely new environments,” writes Tran, “and could have future applications in self-driving cars, search and rescue operations, wildlife monitoring, or even diagnosing medical issues.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere published a paper exploring the abilities of language models and how they differ from those of humans, reports Will Knight for Wired. Prof. Josh Tenenbaum says “GPT-4 is remarkable but quite different from human intelligence in a number of ways,” writes Knight. “It lacks the kind of motivation that is crucial to the human mind.”
NBC News highlights how researchers from MIT and MGH have developed a new AI tool, called Sybil, that can “accurately predict whether a person will develop lung cancer in the next year 86% to 94% of the time.” NBC News notes that according to experts, the tool "could be a leap forward in the early detection of lung cancer.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with WBUR reporter Geoff Brumfiel about her research studying the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare. “When you take state-of-the-art machine learning methods and systems and then evaluate them on different patient groups, they do not perform equally,” says Ghassemi.
Researchers at MIT have created a four-legged robot called DribbleBot, reports Caroline Goggin for WHDH. The robot “can dribble a soccer ball under the same conditions as humans, using onboard sensors to travel across different types of terrain.”
Popular Science reporter Andrew Paul spotlights how researchers from MIT CSAIL have developed a soccer-playing robot, dubbed DribbleBot, that can handle a variety of real-world terrains. “DribbleBot showcases extremely impressive strides in articulation and real-time environmental analysis. Using a combination of onboarding computing and sensing, the team’s four-legged athlete can reportedly handle gravel, grass, sand, snow, and pavement, as well as pick itself up if it falls.”
MIT researchers have created “Dribblebot,” a four-legged robot capable of playing soccer across varying terrain, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch.
Researchers at MIT have created a four-legged robot capable of dribbling a soccer ball and running across a variety of terrains, reports Ross Cristantiello for Boston.com. “Researchers hope that they will be able to teach the robot how to lift a ball over a step in the future,” writes Cristantiello. “They will also explore how the technology behind DribbleBot can be applied to other robots, allowing machines to quickly transport a range of objects around outside using legs and arms.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Scientific American reporter Sara Reardon about the impact of AI chatbots on medical care. “Ghassemi is particularly concerned that chatbots will perpetuate the racism, sexism and other types of prejudice that persist in medicine—and across the Internet,” writes Reardon. “Scrubbing racism from the Internet is impossible, but Ghassemi says developers may be able to do preemptive audits to see where a chatbot gives biased answers and tell it to stop or to identify common biases that pop up in its conversations with users.”
Principal Research Scientist Leo Anthony Celi co-authored a study that found “a lack of racial and gender diversity could be hindering the efforts of researchers working to improve the fairness of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in health care,” reports Carissa Wong for Nature.
Thousands of scientists and tech leaders have signed an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, co-founded by Prof. Max Tegmark, “calling for a six-month ‘pause’ in further development of AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its more advanced version, GPT-4,” reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “We’re trying to pause development…to ensure we can get the upside from AI without unnecessary downside,” says Tegmark.
Prof. Carlo Ratti speaks with CNN reporter Sarah Engel about smart cities and the future of AI infrastructure. Ratti says the key to avoiding pitfalls is to keep citizens engaged: “They should be the ones to decide what kind of city they want to live in tomorrow.”
Researchers at the McGovern and Broad Institutes have developed a bacterial "nanosyringe" that can inject large proteins into specific cells in the body, which could lead to safer and more effective treatments for a variety of conditions, including cancer, reports Michael Le Page for New Scientist. “The fact that this can load a diversity of different payloads of different sizes makes it unique amongst protein delivery devices,” says graduate student Joseph Kreitz.
Ingrid Wickelgren at Scientific American highlights a new study from researchers at the McGovern and Broad Institutes, in which they used a bacterial ‘nanosyringe’ to inject large proteins into human cells. “The syringe technology also holds promise for treating cancer because it can be engineered to attach to receptors on certain cancer cells,” writes Wickelgren.
Al Jazeera reporter Somesh Jha highlights the work of research associate Georgios Petropoulos, who is examining the ways in which artificial intelligence can impact jobs. “His work has shown that in past industrial revolutions too, the displacement of jobs might have dominated in the short run,” writes Jha, “but in the long term, when the markets adapt to the automation shock, increased productivity actually sets the stage for more employment opportunities.”