CSAIL
Helping Robots Avoid Collisions
George Konidaris still remembers his disheartening introduction to robotics. “When you’re a young student and you want to program a robot, the first thing that hits you is this immense disappointment at how much you can’t do with that robot,” he says. Most new roboticists want to program their robots to solve interesting, complex tasks …
Monitoring Sleep Positions For A Healthy Rest
MIT researchers have developed a wireless, private way to monitor a person’s sleep postures — whether snoozing on their back, stomach, or sides — using reflected radio signals from a small device mounted on a bedroom wall. The device, called BodyCompass, is the first home-ready, radio-frequency-based system to provide accurate sleep data without cameras or …
Videogame Examines Racial Attitudes In Virtual Spaces
The national dialogue on race has progressed powerfully and painfully in the past year, and issues of racial bias in the news have become ubiquitous. However, for over a decade, researchers from MIT’s Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) have been developing systems to model, simulate, and analyze such issues of identity. In recent …
Toward A Machine Learning Model That Can Reason About Everyday Actions
The ability to reason abstractly about events as they unfold is a defining feature of human intelligence. We know instinctively that crying and writing are means of communicating, and that a panda falling from a tree and a plane landing are variations on descending. Organizing the world into abstract categories does not come easily to …
Helping Companies Prioritize Their Cybersecurity Investments
One reason that cyberattacks continue to grow in recent years is that we never actually learn all that much about how they happen. Companies fear that reporting attacks will tarnish their public image, and even those who do report them don’t share many details because they worry that their competitors will gain insight into their …
Detecting And Responding To Incidents With Images
When a natural disaster occurs, on-the-ground emergency response teams act quickly to make life-saving decisions. Reducing the response time in such situations is critical to reduce damage impact and save lives. Helpful efforts are being taken to reduce the burden, such as a damage assessment tool by UNDP, though few automated methods exist. In recent work, …
CSAIL To Launch New Initiative For Machine Learning Applications
This week CSAIL will be launching a new initiative focused on machine learning applications. [email protected], or “[email protected]”, will focus on current challenges in machine learning to prepare industry members for digital transformation in their workplaces. “From manufacturing and retail to healthcare and pharmaceuticals, companies that know how to leverage machine learning across their business will …
Data Systems That Learn To Be Better
Big data has gotten really, really big: By 2025, all the world’s data will add up to an estimated 175 trillion gigabytes. For a visual, if you stored that amount of data on DVDs, it would stack up tall enough to circle the Earth 222 times. One of the biggest challenges in computing is handling this …
Shrinking Deep Learning’s Carbon Footprint
In June, OpenAI unveiled the largest language model in the world, a text-generating tool called GPT-3 that can write creative fiction, translate legalese into plain English, and answer obscure trivia questions. It’s the latest feat of intelligence achieved by deep learning, a machine learning method patterned after the way neurons in the brain process and store information. But it …
AI Systems That Work With Doctors And Know When To Step In
In recent years, entire industries have popped up that rely on the delicate interplay between human workers and automated software. Companies like Facebook work to keep hateful and violent content off their platforms using a combination of automated filtering and human moderators. In the medical field, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have used machine learning to help …