To build AI systems that can collaborate effectively with humans, it helps to have a good model of human behavior to start with. But humans tend to behave suboptimally when making decisions. This irrationality, which is especially difficult to model, often boils down to computational constraints. A human can’t spend decades thinking about the ideal solution to a single problem. Researchers at MIT and the University of Washington developed a way to model the behavior of an agent, whether human or machine, that accounts for the unknown computational constraints that may hamper the agent’s proble ..read more

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, aquaculture in the United States represents a $1.5 billion industry annually. Like land-based farming, shellfish aquaculture requires healthy seed production in order to maintain a sustainable industry. Aquaculture hatchery production of shellfish larvae — seeds — requires close monitoring to track mortality rates and assess health from the earliest stages of life.  Careful observation is necessary to inform production scheduling, determine effects of naturally occurring harmful bacteria, and ensure sustainable se ..read more

Although the troposphere is often thought of as the closest layer of the atmosphere to the Earth’s surface, the planetary boundary layer (PBL) — the lowest layer of the troposphere — is actually the part that most significantly influences weather near the surface. In the 2018 planetary science decadal survey, the PBL was raised as an important scientific issue that has the potential to enhance storm forecasting and improve climate projections.   “The PBL is where the surface interacts with the atmosphere, including exchanges of moisture and heat that help lead to severe wea ..read more

On Vassar Street, in the heart of MIT’s campus, the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing recently opened the doors to its new headquarters in Building 45. The building’s central location and welcoming design will help form a new cluster of connectivity at MIT and enable the space to have a multifaceted role.  “The college has a broad mandate for computing across MIT,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “The building is designed to be the computing crossroad ..read more

In biomedicine, segmentation involves annotating pixels from an important structure in a medical image, like an organ or cell. Artificial intelligence models can help clinicians by highlighting pixels that may show signs of a certain disease or anomaly. However, these models typically only provide one answer, while the problem of medical image segmentation is often far from black and white. Five expert human annotators might provide five different segmentations, perhaps disagreeing on the existence or extent of the borders of a nodule in a lung CT image. “Having options can help in decision-ma ..read more

A user could ask ChatGPT to write a computer program or summarize an article, and the AI chatbot would likely be able to generate useful code or write a cogent synopsis. However, someone could also ask for instructions to build a bomb, and the chatbot might be able to provide those, too. To prevent this and other safety issues, companies that build large language models typically safeguard them using a process called red-teaming. Teams of human testers write prompts aimed at triggering unsafe or toxic text from the model being tested. These prompts are used to teach the chatbot to avoid such r ..read more

It’s commonly thought that the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen, exists mainly alongside other elements — with oxygen in water, for example, and with carbon in methane. But naturally occurring underground pockets of pure hydrogen are punching holes in that notion — and generating attention as a potentially unlimited source of carbon-free power.   One interested party is the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month awarded $20 million in research grants to 18 teams from laboratories, universities, and private companies to develop technologies that can lead to cheap, clean ..read more

Since the 1970s, modern antibiotic discovery has been experiencing a lull. Now the World Health Organization has declared the antimicrobial resistance crisis as one of the top 10 global public health threats.  When an infection is treated repeatedly, clinicians run the risk of bacteria becoming resistant to the antibiotics. But why would an infection return after proper antibiotic treatment? One well-documented possibility is that the bacteria are becoming metabolically inert, escaping detection of traditional antibiotics that only respond to metabolic activity. When the danger has passed ..read more

To engineer proteins with useful functions, researchers usually begin with a natural protein that has a desirable function, such as emitting fluorescent light, and put it through many rounds of random mutation that eventually generate an optimized version of the protein. This process has yielded optimized versions of many important proteins, including green fluorescent protein (GFP). However, for other proteins, it has proven difficult to generate an optimized version. MIT researchers have now developed a computational approach that makes it easier to predict mutations that will lead to better ..read more

This is part 1 of a two-part MIT News feature examining new job creation in the U.S. since 1940, based on new research from Ford Professor of Economics David Autor. Part 2 is available here. In 1900, Orville and Wilbur Wright listed their occupations as “Merchant, bicycle” on the U.S. census form. Three years later, they made their famous first airplane flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. So, on the next U.S. census, in 1910, the brothers each called themselves “Inventor, aeroplane.” There weren’t too many of those around at the time, however, and it wasn’t until 1950 that “Airplane designer ..read more