MIT researchers find that one key role of the neuromodulator noradrenaline, produced by the locus coeruleus, is to help the brain learn from surprising outcomes. | Continue reading
MIT’s futuristic space architecture project TESSERAE has flown on the first fully private mission to International Space Station. Ariel Ekblaw discusses how TESSERAE fared, and what the future of space habitats might hold. | Continue reading
Renowned mathematician and quantum computing pioneer Peter W. Shor PhD ’85 has been named the recipient of MIT’s 2022-2023 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the Institute faculty can bestow upon one of its members each academic year. | Continue reading
MIT researchers created a mathematical framework to formally quantify and evaluate the understandability of explanations that seek to describe the behavior of a machine-learning model. | Continue reading
MIT astronomers discovered eight new echoing black hole binaries in our galaxy, enabling them to piece together a general picture of how a black hole evolves during an outburst. | Continue reading
The mammalian brain stores a single memory across a widely distributed, functionally connected complex spanning many brain regions, rather than in just one or even a few places. | Continue reading
Graduate students are helping to infuse ethical computing content into MIT’s largest machine learning course, as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing initiative. | Continue reading
MIT researchers created a portable desalination unit that can remove particles and salts simultaneously to generate drinking water. The user-friendly unit, which weighs less than 10 kilograms and does not require filters, can be powered by a small, portable solar panel. | Continue reading
MIT researchers created an ultrathin loudspeaker that can turn any rigid surface into a high-quality, active audio source. The fabrication process can enable the thin-film devices to be produced at scale. | Continue reading
MIT researchers created an ultrathin loudspeaker that can turn any rigid surface into a high-quality, active audio source. The fabrication process can enable the thin-film devices to be produced at scale. | Continue reading
MIT researchers discovered a new way to estimate the amount of information contained in a piece of data using probabilistic programming and probabilistic inference. The breakthrough entropy estimators open up new applications in medicine, scientific discovery, cognitive science, … | Continue reading
Erez Yoeli of the MIT Sloan School of Management is the co-author of “Hidden Games,” a new book explaining how game theory applies to everyday situations. | Continue reading
MIT CSAIL scientists created an algorithm called STEGO to solve one of the hardest tasks in computer vision: assigning every pixel in the world a label without any human supervision. | Continue reading
MIT researchers engineered a strain of bacteria that can help protect the natural flora of the human digestive tract from antibiotics and curb the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. | Continue reading
The MIT spinout Frequency Therapeutics uses a new kind of druggable regenerative therapy that targets progenitor cells to create hair cells of the inner ear and reverse hearing loss. | Continue reading
Engineers at MIT and NREL have developed a heat engine with no moving parts that is as efficient as a steam turbine. | Continue reading
MIT researchers performed a large-scale, high resolution study of the cells in human breast milk, allowing them to track how these cells change over time in nursing mothers. | Continue reading
Privid is a new system that provides better privacy in video footage from surveillance cameras. The system, developed out of MIT CSAIL, lets analysts submit video data queries, and adds a bit of noise to the end result to ensure an individual can’t be identified. | Continue reading
An MIT analysis of Saharan dust records over last 240,000 years reveals a new “pacemaker” of North African climate. The results show Sahara swung between wet and dry conditions every 20,000 years, in synch with changes in monsoon activity. | Continue reading
By adapting a powerful algorithm, MIT researchers created a user-friendly tool that enables a nonexpert to make predictions with high accuracy using time-series data with just a few keystrokes and in a matter of seconds. | Continue reading
Thesan is a new universe simulation that models the first billion years of the universe with the highest resolution, over the largest volume, to date. | Continue reading
A new technique identifies parameterized quantum circuits that are more robust to noise. The work could improve the accuracy of quantum machine learning and quantum chemistry tasks, while using less computational resources in the circuit design process. | Continue reading
MIT CSAIL scientists came up with a learning pipeline for the four-legged MIT mini cheetah robot that learns to run and adapt to new terrains entirely by trial and error in simulation. | Continue reading
Inspired by the human ear, a new acoustic fabric converts audible sounds into electrical signals. | Continue reading
Around 2.3 billion years ago, oxygen began building up in the atmosphere, eventually reaching the life-sustaining levels we breathe today. A new hypothesis proposed by MIT scientists suggests a mechanism for how this may have happened. | Continue reading
MIT chemical engineers tested how different-sized polymer nanoparticles circulate in the body and interact with platelets, the cells that promote blood clotting. Such particles could be used to help stop internal bleeding after traumatic injuries. | Continue reading
New research from MIT suggests that a certain type of computer vision model that is trained to be robust to imperceptible noise added to image data encodes visual representations similarly to the way humans do using peripheral vision. | Continue reading
ElectroVoxels are self-reconfiguring robot blocks, developed at MIT using embedded electromagnets to test applications for space exploration. | Continue reading
MIT and IBM researchers develop a new deep learning methodology that simulates counterfactual, time-varying and dynamic treatment strategies for critically ill patients, allowing doctors to choose the best course of action. | Continue reading
MIT researchers have found that, if a certain type of machine learning model is trained using an unbalanced dataset, the bias that it learns is impossible to fix after the fact. They developed a technique that induces fairness directly into the model, no matter how unbalanced the … | Continue reading
MIT researchers developed a desalination system that is more efficient and less expensive than previous methods. In addition to providing fresh water, the process could be used to treat contaminated wastewater or generate steam for sterilizing medical instruments, all without req … | Continue reading
The millionth sale of “Introduction to Algorithms” prompts a Q&A with two of its authors, Charles Leiserson and Tom Cormen, to look back at the creation and legacy of the bestselling foundational textbook, now in its fourth edition. | Continue reading
MIT researchers developed a technique that effectively protects computer programs’ secret information from memory-timing side channel attacks, while enabling faster computation than other security schemes. | Continue reading
MIT astronomers have obtained the clearest view yet of the perpetual dark side of an exoplanet that is “tidally locked” to its star. The planet is WASP-121b, a massive gas giant nearly twice the size of Jupiter. | Continue reading
MIT researchers created a technique that can automatically describe the roles of individual neurons in a neural network with natural language, helping machine learning practitioners better understand how their model will behave in the real world. | Continue reading
Researchers at MIT CSAIL developed a new programming language specifically for high-performance computing. With the prototype, says PhD student Amanda Liu, “speed and correctness do not have to compete ... they can go together, hand-in-hand.” | Continue reading
A new woody composite engineered by an MIT team is tough as bone and hard as aluminum, and might pave way for naturally derived plastics. | Continue reading
MIT Professor Rosalind Picard and MGH clinical psychologist Paola Pedrelli are using machine learning and wearable sensors to detect major depressive disorder symptoms in patients. | Continue reading
InfraredTags are invisible tags that can be embedded within the interior of objects fabricated on standard 3D printers. These tags, developed by Mustafa Doga Dogan, Stefanie Mueller, and colleagues at MIT CSAIL, could provide metadata for physical objects the way it is now availa … | Continue reading
In collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, MIT experts have begun designing and testing a technical framework through which Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) research can be performed in the U.S. | Continue reading
MIT PhD student Nina Andrejevic is training her machine-learning models to hunt for new and useful traits in materials. With her twin sister Jovana, she has developed a method for testing material samples to predict the presence of topological characteristics that is faster and m … | Continue reading
MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel, as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities. | Continue reading
MIT Associate Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi offers a cautionary note about the prospects for AI in medicine: “If used carefully, this technology could improve performance in health care and potentially reduce inequities. But if we’re not actually careful, technology could worsen car … | Continue reading
MIT physicists have discovered a new quantum bit, or “qubit,” in the form of vibrating pairs of atoms known as fermions. The new qubit appears to be extremely robust, able to maintain superposition between two vibrational states, even in the midst of environmental noise, for up t … | Continue reading
Feature-attribution methods are used to determine if a neural network is working correctly when completing a task like image classification. MIT researchers developed a way to evaluate whether these feature-attribution methods are correctly identifying the features of an image th … | Continue reading
SketchAdapt, program-writing artificial intelligence system, learns how to compose short, high-level programs, while letting a second set of algorithms find the right sub-programs to fill in the details. | Continue reading
MIT scientists built a 3D atlas of the ocean’s oxygen-starved waters that could help predict oceanic response to climate change. | Continue reading
New sulfur-based processing methods developed by MIT researchers could help ease looming shortages of the essential metals that power everything from phones to automotive batteries. | Continue reading