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Most firetrucks come in red, but it’s not hard to picture one in blue. Computers aren’t nearly as creative. Their understanding of the world is colored, often literally, by the data they’ve trained on. If all they’ve ever seen are pictures of red fire trucks, they have trouble drawing anything else. To give computer vision […] More
This is part 3 of a three-part series examining the effects of robots and automation on employment, based on new research from economist and Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu. Modern technology affects different workers in different ways. In some white-collar jobs — designer, engineer — people become more productive with sophisticated software at their side. In […] More
This is part 2 of a three-part series examining the effects of robots and automation on employment, based on new research from economist and Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu. Overall, adding robots to manufacturing reduces jobs — by more than three per robot, in fact. But a new study co-authored by an MIT professor reveals an […] More
This is part 1 of a three-part series examining the effects of robots and automation on employment, based on new research from economist and Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu. In many parts of the U.S., robots have been replacing workers over the last few decades. But to what extent, really? Some technologists have forecast that […] More
On April 27, the National Academy of Sciences elected 120 new members and 26 international associates, including three professors from MIT — Abhijit Banerjee, Bonnie Berger, and Roger Summons — recognizing their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Current membership totals 2,403 active members and 501 international associates, including 190 Nobel Prize recipients. The National […] More
As more artificial intelligence applications move to smartphones, deep learning models are getting smaller to allow apps to run faster and save battery power. Now, MIT researchers have a new and better way to compress models. It’s so simple that they unveiled it in a tweet last month: Train the model, prune its weakest connections, retrain the […] More
Driven by an innate curiosity, children pick up new skills as they explore the world and learn from their experience. Computers, by contrast, often get stuck when thrown into new environments. To get around this, engineers have tried encoding simple forms of curiosity into their algorithms with the hope that an agent pushed to explore […] More
With various physical distancing guidelines in place throughout the world as a means to curb the spread of Covid-19, the internet has experienced a dramatic spike in overall traffic. MIT Professor Tom Leighton is chief executive officer and co-founder of Akamai Technologies, a global content delivery network, cybersecurity, and cloud service company that provides web […] More
