WBUR’s Deborah Becker speaks with Prof. Regina Barzilay about her work applying AI to health care and Prof. Sangbae Kim about how the natural world has inspired his robotics research during a special Radio Boston segment highlighting innovation in the greater Boston area.
Xconomy reporter Jeff Engel writes about the three-day celebration held for the new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. Engel writes that during the event, Eric Schmidt, technical advisor for Alphabet, noted that the new college will help address the AI talent shortage. “The level of demand across everything is exploding in this field,” Schmidt explained.
The Associated Press reports that MIT postdoc Nataliya Kosmyna has developed a “Thinking Cap” that analyzes brain activity to sort wearers into a Hogwarts house. The cap, which uses noninvasive electrodes, will eventually be used to help students build self-esteem.
MIT postdoc Nataliya Kosmyna demonstrated a device dubbed the “Thinking Cap” at the MIT Computing Expo, part of the Institute’s celebration of the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Kosmyna explains that the “Thinking Cap” aims to help students build self-esteem and improve their academic performance, writes Steve Annear of The Boston Globe.
Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe writes about the celebration of the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, which featured a demonstration of the Mini Cheetah robot. Learning how machines can simulate the behavior of living organisms like the cheetah “is just the kind of problem the new College of Computing is intended to solve,” writes Bray.
New York Times reporter Janet Morrissey spotlights Prof. Regina Barzilay and Prof. Dina Katabi’s work developing new AI systems aimed at improving health care. “It’s absolutely the future; it’s even the present,” says Barzilay. “The question is how fast do we adopt it?”
Wall Street Journal reporter Alicia Wallace spotlights MIT’s AI executive education course, which “aims to make a technologically complicated topic accessible by the pacing of the course and by providing examples of practical applications.”
In an article for the Financial Times, President L. Rafael Reif calls for government investment in AI research, and educational offerings that integrate the study of AI into every discipline. “Those nations and institutions which act now to help shape the future of AI will help shape the future for us all,” writes Reif.
Graduate student Joy Buolamwini writes for TIME about the need to tackle gender and racial bias in AI systems. “By working to reduce the exclusion overhead and enabling marginalized communities to engage in the development and governance of AI, we can work toward creating systems that embrace full spectrum inclusion,” writes Buolamwini.
Wall Street Journal reporter Sara Castellanos spotlights how researchers from MIT and Microsoft participated in a two-day hackathon with curators and digital experts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Together, they aimed to develop new AI technologies that could deliver new and personalized experiences “with a view toward deepening user engagement.”
Prof. Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, writes for Wired about how AI systems can help perpetuate longstanding discriminatory practices. “By merely relying on historical data and current definitions of fairness, we will lock in the accumulated unfairnesses of the past,” argues Ito, “and our algorithms and the products they support will always trail the norms.”
In this video, graduate student Nima Fazeli speaks with the BBC News about his work developing a robot that uses sensors and cameras to learn how to play Jenga. “It’s using these techniques from AI and machine learning to be able to predict the future of its actions and decide what is the next best move,” explains Fazeli.
CBS This Morning spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new robot that can successfully play Jenga. “It is an automated system that has had a learning period first,” explains Prof. Alberto Rodriguez. “It uses the information from the camera and the force sensor to interpret its interactions with the Jenga tower.”
MIT researchers have developed a robot that can play Jenga. “It "learns" whether to remove a specific block in real time, using visual and tactile feedback, in much the same way as a human player would switch blocks if the tower started to wobble,” reports Jack Guy for CNN.
MIT researchers have developed a robot that can learn how to successfully play Jenga, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “The robot has to learn in the real world, by interacting with the real Jenga tower,” explains Prof. Alberto Rodriguez. “The key challenge is to learn from a relatively small number of experiments by exploiting common sense about objects and physics.”