Artificial intelligence

MIT Professor Regina Barzilay has struck up new research collaborations, drawn in MIT students, launched projects with local doctors, and begun empowering cancer treatment with the machine-learning insight that has already transformed many areas of modern life.

Putting data in the hands of doctors

Computer scientist Regina Barzilay empowers cancer treatment with machine learning.

February 16, 2017

Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories have built a low-power chip specialized for automatic speech recognition. With power savings of 90 to 99 percent, it could make voice control practical for relatively simple electronic devices.

Voice control everywhere

Low-power special-purpose chip could make speech recognition ubiquitous in electronics.

February 13, 2017

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are trying to improve automated planners by giving them the benefit of human intuition. By encoding the strategies of high-performing human planners in a machine-readable form, they were able to improve the performance of competition-winning planning algorithms by between 10 and 15 percent on a challenging set of prob...

Researchers add a splash of human intuition to planning algorithms

Incorporating strategies from skilled human planners improves automatic planners’ performance.

February 7, 2017

Fadel Adib has joined the Media Lab faculty to head the new research group Signal Kinetics.

Fadel Adib joins Media Lab faculty

Adib is directing a new research group at the Media Lab, aiming to uncover, analyze, and engineer natural and human-made networks.

January 27, 2017

Play Labs, a playful tech accelerator for MIT students and alumni, launches

MIT Game Lab, Bayview Labs, and Seraph Group announce funding, facilities, and mentorship for startups focusing on virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.

January 20, 2017

Professor Daniela Rus stands with autonomous SMART vehicles on the MIT campus.

SMART automation

MIT Professor Daniela Rus combines automation and mobility to create a smarter world.

January 19, 2017

The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund will support work around the world that advances the development of artificial intelligence in the public interest.

MIT Media Lab to participate in $27 million initiative on AI ethics and governance

Fund establishes a global initiative to advance artificial intelligence research for the public good.

January 10, 2017

A new MIT system first creates a graph of vehicles (circles) and ride requests (stars) in a city, and then uses a method called “integer linear programming” to compute the best assignment of vehicles to trips.

How ride-sharing can improve traffic, save money, and help the environment

Study shows carpooling apps could reduce congestion by a factor of three while still serving the same number of people.

January 4, 2017

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and its Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems have designed a new algorithm that makes it much more practical to select diverse subsets from a much larger dataset.

Data diversity

Preserving variety in subsets of unmanageably large data sets should aid machine learning.

December 16, 2016

A new technique devised by MIT researchers can take data sets with huge numbers of variables and find approximations of them with far fewer variables.

Making big data manageable

Technique shrinks data sets while preserving their fundamental mathematical relationships.

December 14, 2016

MIT researchers have developed a new approach to training speech-recognition systems that doesn’t depend on transcription. Instead, their system analyzes correspondences between images and spoken descriptions of those images, as captured in a large collection of audio recordings.

Learning words from pictures

System correlates recorded speech with images, could lead to fully automated speech recognition.

December 6, 2016

The researchers’ neural network was fed video from 26 terabytes of video data downloaded from the photo-sharing site Flickr. Researchers found the network can interpret natural sounds in terms of image categories. For instance, the network might determine that the sound of birdsong tends to be associated with forest scenes and pictures of trees, birds, birdhouses, and bird feeders.

Computer learns to recognize sounds by watching video

Machine-learning system doesn’t require costly hand-annotated data.

December 2, 2016

Tomaso Poggio, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, has long thought that the brain must produce “invariant” representations of faces and other objects, meaning representations that are indifferent to objects’ orientation in space, their distance from the viewer, or their location in the visual field.

How the brain recognizes faces

Machine-learning system spontaneously reproduces aspects of human neurology.

December 1, 2016

Given a still image from a scene, new deep-learning algorithm can create a brief video that simulates the future of that scene.

Creating videos of the future

Given a still image, CSAIL deep-learning system generates videos that predict what will happen next in a scene.

November 29, 2016