New MIT program to train military leaders for the AI age
Artificial intelligence can enhance decision-making and enable action with reduced risk and greater precision, making it a critical tool for national security. A new program offered jointly by the MIT departments of Mechanical Engineering (Course 2, MechE) and...
New method improves the reliability of statistical estimations
Let’s say an environmental scientist is studying whether exposure to air pollution is associated with lower birth weights in a particular county. They might train a machine-learning model to estimate the magnitude of this association, since machine-learning methods...
Enabling small language models to solve complex reasoning tasks
As language models (LMs) improve at tasks like image generation, trivia questions, and simple math, you might think that human-like reasoning is around the corner. In reality, they still trail us by a wide margin on complex tasks. Try playing Sudoku with one, for...
Deep-learning model predicts how fruit flies form, cell by cell
During early development, tissues and organs begin to bloom through the shifting, splitting, and growing of many thousands of cells. A team of MIT engineers has now developed a way to predict, minute by minute, how individual cells will fold, divide, and rearrange...
Working to eliminate barriers to adopting nuclear energy
What if there were a way to solve one of the most significant obstacles to the use of nuclear energy — the disposal of high-level nuclear waste (HLW)? Dauren Sarsenbayev, a third-year doctoral student at the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is...
3 Questions: Using computation to study the world’s best single-celled chemists
Today, out of an estimated 1 trillion species on Earth, 99.999 percent are considered microbial — bacteria, archaea, viruses, and single-celled eukaryotes. For much of our planet’s history, microbes ruled the Earth, able to live and thrive in the most extreme of...
“Robot, make me a chair”
Computer-aided design (CAD) systems are tried-and-true tools used to design many of the physical objects we use each day. But CAD software requires extensive expertise to master, and many tools incorporate such a high level of detail they don’t lend themselves to...
New materials could boost the energy efficiency of microelectronics
MIT researchers have developed a new fabrication method that could enable the production of more energy efficient electronics by stacking multiple functional components on top of one existing circuit. In traditional circuits, logic devices that perform computation,...
MIT affiliates named 2025 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows
Two current MIT affiliates and seven additional alumni are among those named to the 2025 cohort of AI2050 Fellows. Zongyi Li, a postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Tess Smidt ’12, an associate professor of electrical engineering...
A smarter way for large language models to think about hard problems
To make large language models (LLMs) more accurate when answering harder questions, researchers can let the model spend more time thinking about potential solutions. But common approaches that give LLMs this capability set a fixed computational budget for every...