Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter spotlights various MIT research efforts aimed at ensuring that AI is used to empower human workers rather than replace them. Prof. David Autor notes: “AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.”
Harry Rein '15, MEng '16 and Chris Tinsley MBA '20 co-founded ShopMy, a marketing platform designed to connect content creators with brands and monetize their content, reports Laruen Forristal for TechCrunch. “ShopMy’s marketing platform equips creators with the tools they need to earn from their product recommendations, like building digital storefronts, accessing a catalog of millions of products, making commissionable links and chatting directly with companies via mobile app,” explains Forristal.
Prof. Pulkit Agrawal and graduate student Gabriel Margolis speak with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about the simulation research and technology used in developing intelligent machines. “Simulation is a digital twin of reality,” says Agrawal. “But simulation still doesn’t have data, it is a digital twin of the environment. So, what we do is something called reinforcement learning which is learning by trial and error which means that we can try out many different combinations.”
Birago Jones SM '12 and Karthik Dinakar SM '12, PhD '17 co-founded Pienso – an AI platform that “lets users build and deploy models without having to write code,” reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Pienso’s flexible, no-code interface allows teams to train models directly using their own company’s data,” says Jones. “This alleviates the privacy concerns of using … models, and also is more accurate, capturing the nuances of each individual company.”
Prof. Thomas Malone speaks with Poets & Quants for Executives reporter Alison Damast about the executive education course he teaches with Prof. Daniela Rus that aims to provide senior-level managers with a better sense of how AI works. “We are certainly not trying to teach people to understand the details of how to write AI programs, though some of those in the course may know that already,” Malone says. “What we are trying to do is give them a sense of when it is easy and when it is hard to use AI technology at various times for different kinds of business applications.”
Research Scientist Eva Ponce speaks with Fast Company to explain how AI will impact supply chains. “One of the most common reasons I have seen companies fail when implementing disruptive technologies like AI is when they are rushing, with a lack of clear vision,” says Ponce.
Mashable reporter Adele Walton spotlights Joy Buolamwini PhD '22 and her work in uncovering racial bias in digital technology. “Buolamwini created what she called the Aspire Mirror, which used face-tracking software to register the movements of the user and overlay them onto an aspirational figure,” explains Walton. “When she realised the facial recognition wouldn’t detect her until she was holding a white mask over her face, she was confronted face on with what she termed the ‘coded gaze.’ She soon founded the Algorithmic Justice League, which exists to prevent AI harms and increase accountability.”
Writing for Fast Company, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota '08, SM '16, MBA '16 shares methods to address the influence of AI in healthcare. “Despite these advances [of AI in healthcare], the full spectrum of AI’s potential remains largely untapped,” explains Hayes-Mota. “Systemic hurdles such as data privacy concerns, the absence of standardized data protocols, regulatory complexities, and ethical dilemmas are compounded by an inherent resistance to change within the healthcare profession. These barriers underscore the urgent need for transformative action from all stakeholders to fully harness AI’s capabilities.”
A new study conducted by researchers at MIT and elsewhere has found large language models (LLMs) can be used to predict the future as well as humans can, reports Chris Stokel-Walker for Fast Company. “Accurate forecasting of future events is very important to many aspects of human economic activity, especially within white collar occupations, such as those of law, business and policy,” says postdoctoral fellow Peter S. Park.
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about the history and future of artificial neural networks and their role in large language models. “The early artificial neuron was a very simple mathematical model,” says Rus. “The computation was discrete and very simple, essentially a step function. You’re either above or below a value.”
Wardah Inam SM '12, PhD '16 founded Overjet, an AI platform that helps dentists “diagnose diseases from scans and other data,” reports Saritha Rai for Bloomberg. “Dentistry was more art than science, and I wanted to bring technology and AI to help dentists make objective decisions,” says Inam. “We began building and then improving our AI systems with tens of millions of pieces of data, including X-rays, historical information, dentist notes, and periodontal charts.”
Senior Lecturer Luis Videgaray speaks with Government Technology reporter Nikki Davidson about concerns facing emerging AI programs and initiatives. Videgaray underscores the importance of finding vendors, "who are willing to protect the data in a way that is appropriate and also provides the state or local government agency with the required degree of transparency about the workings of the model, the data that was used for training and how that data will interact with the data supplied by the customer.”
Prof. Philip Isola and Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speak with Associated Press reporter Matt O’Brien about AI generated images and videos. Rus says the computing resources required for AI video generation are “significantly higher than for still image generation” because “it involves processing and generating multiple frames for each second of video.”
Boston Globe reporter Michael Silverman spotlights the 18th MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference focused on a, “diverse array of heady topics such as artificial intelligence, the globalization of soccer, the next phase of sports ownership, the evolutional of poker strategy,” writes Silverman, noting that “nearly every conversation on stage seemed to circle back to a shared belief that the momentum already carrying women’s sports is on the verge of a new surge.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Evan Sellinger about her new book, “The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future With Robots,” in which she makes the case that in the future robots and humans will be able to team up to create a better world. “I want to highlight that machines don’t have to compete with humans, because we each have different strengths. Humans have wisdom. Machines have speed, can process large numbers, and can do many dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks,” Rus explains. “I see robots as helpers for our jobs. They’ll take on the routine, repetitive tasks, ensuring human workers focus on more complex and meaningful work.”