Ashutosh Kumar is a classically trained materials engineer. Having grown up with a passion for making things, he has explored steel design and studied stress fractures in alloys. Throughout Kumar’s education, however, he was also drawn to biology and medicine. When he was accepted into an undergraduate metallurgical engineering and materials science program at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, the native of Jamshedpur was very excited — and “a little dissatisfied, since I couldn’t do biology anymore.” Now a PhD candidate and a MathWorks Fellow in MIT’s Department of Materials Scienc ..read more

Imagine a slime-like robot that can seamlessly change its shape to squeeze through narrow spaces, which could be deployed inside the human body to remove an unwanted item. While such a robot does not yet exist outside a laboratory, researchers are working to develop reconfigurable soft robots for applications in health care, wearable devices, and industrial systems. But how can one control a squishy robot that doesn’t have joints, limbs, or fingers that can be manipulated, and instead can drastically alter its entire shape at will? MIT researchers are working to answer that question. They deve ..read more

How is the field of artificial intelligence evolving and what does it mean for the future of work, education, and humanity? MIT President Sally Kornbluth and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman covered all that and more in a wide-ranging discussion on MIT’s campus May 2. The success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language models has helped spur a wave of investment and innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT-3.5 became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history after its release at the end of 2022, with hundreds of millions of people using the tool. Since then, OpenAI has al ..read more

A single photograph offers glimpses into the creator’s world — their interests and feelings about a subject or space. But what about creators behind the technologies that help to make those images possible?  MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Associate Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley is one such person, who has designed everything from tools for visual effects in movies to the Halide programming language that’s widely used in industry for photo editing and processing. As a researcher with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intellig ..read more

The recent ransomware attack on ChangeHealthcare, which severed the network connecting health care providers, pharmacies, and hospitals with health insurance companies, demonstrates just how disruptive supply chain attacks can be. In this case, it hindered the ability of those providing medical services to submit insurance claims and receive payments. This sort of attack and other forms of data theft are becoming increasingly common and often target large, multinational corporations through the small and mid-sized vendors in their corporate supply chains, enabling breaks in these enormous sys ..read more

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly useful for programming and robotics tasks, but for more complicated reasoning problems, the gap between these systems and humans looms large. Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions — essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important details — and thus sputter when asked to do more sophisticated tasks. Luckily, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have found a treasure trove of abstractions within na ..read more

The return of spring in the Northern Hemisphere touches off tornado season. A tornado's twisting funnel of dust and debris seems an unmistakable sight. But that sight can be obscured to radar, the tool of meteorologists. It's hard to know exactly when a tornado has formed, or even why. A new dataset could hold answers. It contains radar returns from thousands of tornadoes that have hit the United States in the past 10 years. Storms that spawned tornadoes are flanked by other severe storms, some with nearly identical conditions, that never did. MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers who curated the ..read more

How can MIT’s community leverage generative AI to support learning and work on campus and beyond? At MIT’s Festival of Learning 2024, faculty and instructors, students, staff, and alumni exchanged perspectives about the digital tools and innovations they’re experimenting with in the classroom. Panelists agreed that generative AI should be used to scaffold — not replace — learning experiences. This annual event, co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor, celebrates teaching and learning innovations. When introducing new teaching and learning technologies, panelists ..read more

Julie Shah ’04, SM ’06, PhD ’11, the H.N. Slater Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics, has been named the new head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), effective May 1. “Julie brings an exceptional record of visionary and interdisciplinary leadership to this role. She has made substantial technical contributions in the field of robotics and AI, particularly as it relates to the future of work, and has bridged important gaps in the social, ethical, and economic implications of AI and computing,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy office ..read more

For nearly a decade, a team of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have been seeking to uncover why certain images persist in a people's minds, while many others fade. To do this, they set out to map the spatio-temporal brain dynamics involved in recognizing a visual image. And now for the first time, scientists harnessed the combined strengths of magnetoencephalography (MEG), which captures the timing of brain activity, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which identifies active brain regions, to precisely determine when and where the ..read more