Teaching AI to communicate sounds like humans do
Whether you’re describing the sound of your faulty car engine or meowing like your neighbor’s cat, imitating sounds with your voice can be a helpful way to relay a concept when words don’t do the trick. Vocal imitation is the sonic equivalent of doodling a quick...
A new computational model can predict antibody structures more accurately
By adapting artificial intelligence models known as large language models, researchers have made great progress in their ability to predict a protein’s structure from its sequence. However, this approach hasn’t been as successful for antibodies, in part because of the...
Unlocking the hidden power of boiling — for energy, space, and beyond
Most people take boiling water for granted. For Associate Professor Matteo Bucci, uncovering the physics behind boiling has been a decade-long journey filled with unexpected challenges and new insights. The seemingly simple phenomenon is extremely hard to study in...
Ecologists find computer vision models’ blind spots in retrieving wildlife images
Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great...
Startup’s autonomous drones precisely track warehouse inventories
Whether you’re a fulfillment center, a manufacturer, or a distributor, speed is king. But getting products out the door quickly requires workers to know where those products are located in their warehouses at all times. That may sound obvious, but lost or misplaced...
MIT welcomes Frida Polli as its next visiting innovation scholar
Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her leading-edge contributions at the crossroads of behavioral science and artificial intelligence, is MIT’s new visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 academic year. She is the first...
Need a research hypothesis? Ask AI.
Crafting a unique and promising research hypothesis is a fundamental skill for any scientist. It can also be time consuming: New PhD candidates might spend the first year of their program trying to decide exactly what to explore in their experiments. What if...
MIT engineers grow “high-rise” 3D chips
The electronics industry is approaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto the surface of a computer chip. So, chip manufacturers are looking to build up rather than out. Instead of squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto a single surface,...
When MIT’s interdisciplinary NEET program is a perfect fit
At an early age, Katie Spivakovsky learned to study the world from different angles. Dinner-table conversations at her family’s home in Menlo Park, California, often leaned toward topics like the Maillard reaction — the chemistry behind food browning — or the...
MIT researchers introduce Boltz-1, a fully open-source model for predicting biomolecular structures
MIT scientists have released a powerful, open-source AI model, called Boltz-1, that could significantly accelerate biomedical research and drug development. Developed by a team of researchers in the MIT Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, Boltz-1 is the...