Fortune reporter Gabby Shacknai spotlights Joy Buolamwini PhD ’22 and her research in racial bias in AI. “After finishing grad school, Biolamwini decided to continue her research on A.I.’s racial bias and quickly realized that much of this was a result of the non-diverse datasets and imagery used by a disproportionately white, male tech workforce to train A.I. and inform its algorithms,” writes Shacknai.
Graduate student Kevin Frans co-founded OpenAI, a for-profit research lab that aims to provide free public access to artificial intelligence systems, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Our mission is to put AI is the hands of everyone,” says Frans.
MIT researchers have developed a new technique aimed at protecting images from AI generators, reports Kyle Barr for Gizmodo. The program uses "data poisoning techniques to essentially disturb pixels within an image to create invisible noise, effectively making AI art generators incapable of generating realistic deepfakes based on the photos they’re fed,” reports Kyle Barr for Gizmodo."
Researchers from MIT and other institutions have found that an AI system called KataGo can be consistently tricked into losing at the strategy game of Go, reports Jeremy Kahn for Fortune. This research highlights potential similar vulnerabilities in “other AI systems trained in a similar manner,” writes Kahn.
Scientists at MIT have developed “a machine learning model that can capture how sounds in a room will propagate through space,” report Kyle Wiggers and Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch. “By modeling the acoustics, the system can learn a room’s geometry from sound recordings, which can then be used to build a visual rendering of a room,” write Wiggers and Coldewey.
MIT researchers have developed a new machine learning model that can identify and track blobs of plasma created in controlled nuclear-fusion research, reports Ed Browne for Newsweek. “Fusion research is a complex, multidisciplinary project that requires technologies from many fields,” explains graduate student Woonghee “Harry” Han.
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Forbes reporter John Koetsier about the future of robotics. “I have been on a quest to have universal machines,” says Rus. “My idea is to create universal robot cells that could combine to form different types of machines, each with the same capability.”
Researchers at MIT are working on a system that can track the development of Parkinson’s disease by monitoring a person’s gait speed, reports Kyle Wiggers and Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch. “The MIT Parkinson’s-tracking effort aims to help clinicians overcome challenges in treating the estimated 10 million people afflicted by the disease globally,” writes Wiggers and Coldewey.
Vox reporter Bryan Walsh spotlights Prof. Max Tegmark, co-founder of The Future of Life Institute (FLI), for his work in reducing technological existential disasters. “In creating FLI, Tegmark joined a host of other institutions… that arose in recent years to put both a scholarly and an activist lens of the rising danger of existential catastrophes,” writes Walsh.
Vox reporter Sigal Samuel spotlights Joy Buolamwini MS ’17 PhD ’22 for her work in uncovering the bias in artificial intelligence and the real-world harm it creates. Buolamwini “founded the Algorithmic Justice League, where researchers work with activists to hold the AI industry to account,” writes Samuel.
Alexander Sludds, a graduate student in MIT’s Research Lab for Electronics, joins Megan Cantwell on the Science magazine podcast to discuss his team’s new method for processing data on edge devices, which are devices that connect two networks together.
MIT’s mini cheetah robot was taught how to goal keep using simulation, reports Emmett Smith for Mashable. “The robot was able to block 87.5 percent of the shots taken, which is just slightly above the best professional goalies in the English Premiere League,” writes Smith.
In a new paper, MIT researchers detail the use of reinforcement learning to teach MIT’s mini cheetah robot to play goalie in a soccer match, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “In this work, we focused solely on the goalkeeping task, but the proposed framework can be extended to other scenarios, such as multi-skill soccer ball kicking,” the researchers explain.
Institute Prof. Barbara Liskov discusses the importance of including ethics and foresight as a key parts of computer science education, reports Susan D'Agostino for Inside Higher Ed. “The days of being naïvely technical, which we were for many years, are over,” says Liskov. “We need to open students’ minds so they think about the harm that can come from what they’re doing and so they ask, ‘What could I add that could act as a safeguard?’ It’s more than ethics. They need to think from a different perspective.”
At MIT’s AI Policy Forum Summit, which was focused on exploring the challenges facing the implementation of AI technologies across a variety of sectors, SEC Chair Gary Gensler and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Dean Daniel Huttenlocher discussed the impact of AI on the world of finance. “If someone is relying on open-AI, that's a concentrated risk and a lot of fintech companies can build on top of it,” Gensler said. “Then you have a node that's every bit as systemically relevant as maybe a stock exchange."