Data, systems, and society

Research that crosses the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines, and boundaries between academia, industry, and government, is increasingly widespread, and has sometimes led to the spawning of significant new disciplines. But Munther Dahleh, a professor of...

How we really judge AI

Suppose you were shown that an artificial intelligence tool offers accurate predictions about some stocks you own. How would you feel about using it? Now, suppose you are applying for a job at a company where the HR department uses an AI system to screen resumes....

Helping machines understand visual content with AI

Data should drive every decision a modern business makes. But most businesses have a massive blind spot: They don’t know what’s happening in their visual data. Coactive is working to change that. The company, founded by Cody Coleman ’13, MEng ’15 and William Gaviria...

Envisioning a future where health care tech leaves some behind

Will the perfect storm of potentially life-changing, artificial intelligence-driven health care and the desire to increase profits through subscription models alienate vulnerable patients? For the third year in a row, MIT’s Envisioning the Future of Computing...

Teaching AI models what they don’t know

Artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT provide plausible-sounding answers to any question you might ask. But they don’t always reveal the gaps in their knowledge or areas where they’re uncertain. That problem can have huge consequences as AI systems are...

AI stirs up the recipe for concrete in MIT study

For weeks, the whiteboard in the lab was crowded with scribbles, diagrams, and chemical formulas. A research team across the Olivetti Group and the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) was working intensely on a key problem: How can we reduce the amount of cement...

Teaching AI models the broad strokes to sketch more like humans do

When you’re trying to communicate or understand ideas, words don’t always do the trick. Sometimes the more efficient approach is to do a simple sketch of that concept — for example, diagramming a circuit might help make sense of how the system works. But what if...

Rationale engineering generates a compact new tool for gene therapy

Scientists at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have re-engineered a compact RNA-guided enzyme they found in bacteria into an efficient, programmable editor of human DNA.  The protein they created, called...