MIT
Giving Robots Social Skills
Robots can deliver food on a college campus and hit a hole-in-one on the golf course, but even the most sophisticated robot can’t perform basic social interactions that are critical to everyday human life. MIT researchers have now incorporated certain social interactions into a framework for robotics, enabling machines to understand what it means to …
Toward Speech Recognition For Uncommon Spoken Languages
Automated speech-recognition technology has become more common with the popularity of virtual assistants like Siri, but many of these systems only perform well with the most widely spoken of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages. Because these systems largely don’t exist for less common languages, the millions of people who speak them are cut off from …
Dexterous Robotic Hands Manipulate Thousands Of Objects With Ease
At just one year old, a baby is more dexterous than a robot. Sure, machines can do more than just pick up and put down objects, but we’re not quite there as far as replicating a natural pull towards exploratory or sophisticated dexterous manipulation goes. OpenAI gave it a try with “Dactyl” (meaning “finger” from …
Making Machine Learning More Useful To High-Stakes Decision Makers
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in seven children in the United States experienced abuse or neglect in the past year. Child protective services agencies around the nation receive a high number of reports each year (about 4.4 million in 2019) of alleged neglect or abuse. With so many cases, …
One Autonomous Taxi, Please
If you don’t get seasick, an autonomous boat might be the right mode of transportation for you. Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Laboratory, together with Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) in the Netherlands, have now created the final project in their self-navigating trilogy: …
One Giant Leap For The Mini Cheetah
A loping cheetah dashes across a rolling field, bounding over sudden gaps in the rugged terrain. The movement may look effortless, but getting a robot to move this way is an altogether different prospect. In recent years, four-legged robots inspired by the movement of cheetahs and other animals have made great leaps forward, yet …
Artificial Networks Learn To Smell Like The Brain
Using machine learning, a computer model can teach itself to smell in just a few minutes. When it does, researchers have found, it builds a neural network that closely mimics the olfactory circuits that animal brains use to process odors. Animals from fruit flies to humans all use essentially the same strategy to process olfactory information in …
Accelerating The Discovery Of New Materials For 3D Printing
The growing popularity of 3D printing for manufacturing all sorts of items, from customized medical devices to affordable homes, has created more demand for new 3D printing materials designed for very specific uses. To cut down on the time it takes to discover these new materials, researchers at MIT have developed a data-driven process that …
New Fibers Can Make Breath-Regulating Garments
A new kind of fiber developed by researchers at MIT and in Sweden can be made into clothing that senses how much it is being stretched or compressed, and then provides immediate tactile feedback in the form of pressure, lateral stretch, or vibration. Such fabrics, the team suggests, could be used in garments that help …
Making Data Visualizations More Accessible
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a simple chart to illustrate how measures like mask wearing and social distancing could “flatten the curve” and reduce the peak of infections. The chart was amplified by news sites and shared on social media platforms, but it …