Subterms
This week the White House announced that MIT Professor Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has been selected to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The council provides advice to the White House on topics critical to U.S. security and the economy, including […] More
It was clear early on in the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic that a critical need in the coming weeks and months would be for ventilators, the potentially life-saving devices that keep air flowing into a patient whose ability to breathe is failing. Seeing a potential shortfall of hundreds of thousands of such units, professor of mechanical […] More
The comedian Bill Burr has said he refuses to call into automated customer service lines for fear that, years later on his death bed, all he’ll be able to think about are the moments he wasted dealing with chatbots. Indeed, the frustrating experience of trying to complete even the most straightforward task through an automated […] More
MIT researchers have designed a congestion-control scheme for wireless networks that could help reduce lag times and increase quality in video streaming, video chat, mobile gaming, and other web services. To keep web services running smoothly, congestion-control schemes infer information about a network’s bandwidth capacity and congestion based on feedback from the network routers, which […] More
Imagine you’ve been diagnosed as Covid-19 positive. Health officials begin contact tracing to contain infections, asking you to identify people with whom you’ve been in close contact. The obvious people come to mind — your family, your coworkers. But what about the woman ahead of you in line last week at the pharmacy, or the […] More
For decades researchers have envisioned a world where digital user interfaces are seamlessly integrated with the physical environment, until the two are virtually indistinguishable from one another. This vision, though, is held up by a few boundaries. First, it’s difficult to integrate sensors and display elements into our tangible world due to various design constraints. […] More
In light of the recent events surrounding Covid-19, learning for grades K-12 looks very different than it did a month ago. Parents and educators may be feeling overwhelmed about turning their homes into classrooms. With that in mind, a team led by Media Lab Associate Professor Cynthia Breazeal has launched aieducation.mit.edu to share a variety of […] More
When an introductory computational science class, which is open to the general public, was repurposed to study the Covid-19 pandemic this spring, the instructors saw student registration rise from 20 students to nearly 300. Introduction to Computational Thinking (6.S083/18.S190), which applies data science, artificial intelligence, and mathematical models using the Julia programming language developed at […] More
