Artificial intelligence

At a time of rapid advances in intelligence research across many disciplines, the MIT Intelligence Quest will encourage researchers to investigate the societal implications of their work as they pursue hard problems lying beyond the current horizon of what is known.

Institute launches the MIT Intelligence Quest

New Institute-wide initiative will advance human and machine intelligence research.

February 1, 2018

Play Labs accelerator announces second annual open call for submissions

Digital currency and blockchain technology added to this year’s list of “playful tech” eligible startups.

January 24, 2018

Giant Otter Technologies, founded by artificial intelligence video game developer Jeff Orkin, an MIT Media Lab alumnus, has developed a platform that uses AI algorithms and crowdsourced annotators to build a natural-language database that helps chatbots expertly navigate human conversations.

Bots that talk more like people

AI platform allows chatbots to draw on robust language database to better navigate human conversation.

January 23, 2018

Engineers design artificial synapse for “brain-on-a-chip” hardware

Design is major stepping stone toward portable artificial-intelligence devices.

January 22, 2018

D. Fox Harrell is the director of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

3Q: D. Fox Harrell on his video game for the #MeToo era

The computer scientist’s group has designed a game that gets players to reflect on sexual misconduct in the workplace.

January 19, 2018

A new machine-learning system for analyzing materials “recipes” uses a variational autoencoder, which squeezes data (left-hand circles) down into a more compact form (center circles) before attempting to re-expand it into its original form (right-hand circles). If the autoencoder is successfully trained, the compact representation will capture the data’s most salient characteristics.

Can computers help us synthesize new materials?

Machine-learning system finds patterns in materials “recipes,” even when training data is lacking.

December 21, 2017

Class 2.680 (Unmanned Marine Vehicle Autonomy, Sensing and Communications), which is offered during spring semester, is structured around the presence of ice on the Charles. While the river is covered by a thick sheet of ice in February and into March, students are taught to code and program a remotely-piloted marine vehicle for a given mission.

Unlocking marine mysteries with artificial intelligence

Students put their AI software for underwater vehicles to the test on the Charles River.

December 14, 2017

As part of an investigation into the nature of humans' physical intuitions, MIT researchers trained a neural network to predict how unstably stacked blocks would respond to the force of gravity.

Computer systems predict objects’ responses to physical forces

Results may help explain how humans do the same thing.

December 13, 2017

Neural nets are so named because they roughly approximate the structure of the human brain. Typically, they’re arranged into layers, and each layer consists of many simple processing units — nodes — each of which is connected to several nodes in the layers above and below. Data is fed into the lowest layer, whose nodes process it and pass it to the next layer. The connections between layers ...

Reading a neural network’s mind

Technique illuminates the inner workings of artificial-intelligence systems that process language.

December 10, 2017

To determine what products a given customer might like, recommendation systems at websites such as Amazon and Netflix look for other customers who have assigned similar ratings to a similar range of products, and extrapolate from there.

Try this! Researchers devise better recommendation algorithm

Improved recommendation algorithm should work especially well when ratings data are “sparse.”

December 6, 2017

Vivienne Sze and Joel Emer teach Hardware Architecture for Deep Learning, a class in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that focuses on building specialized hardware for AI.

Building the hardware for the next generation of artificial intelligence

Class taught by Vivienne Sze and Joel Emer brings together traditionally separate disciplines for advances in deep learning.

November 30, 2017

President Reif: We must build a future in which technology works for everyone

Boston Globe op-ed by MIT president calls for a “whole-society effort” to address profound challenges posed by automation.

November 10, 2017

MIT Professor Daniela Rus (right), director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, speaks with Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt.

Summit discusses impact of machines on jobs, productivity, and the global economy

Two-day “AI and the Future of Work” summit at MIT focused on the artificial intelligence revolution and the workplace.

November 7, 2017