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Suppose you would like to know mortality rates for women during childbirth, by country, around the world. Where would you look? One option is the WomanStats Project, the website of an academic research effort investigating the links between the security and activities of nation-states, and the security of the women who live in them. The […] More
The work of MIT computer scientist Aleksander Madry is fueled by one core mission: “doing machine learning the right way.” Madry’s research centers largely on making machine learning — a type of artificial intelligence — more accurate, efficient, and robust against errors. In his classroom and beyond, he also worries about questions of ethical computing, […] More
Training interactive robots may one day be an easy job for everyone, even those without programming expertise. Roboticists are developing automated robots that can learn new tasks solely by observing humans. At home, you might someday show a domestic robot how to do routine chores. In the workplace, you could train robots like new employees, […] More
When we open our eyes, we immediately see our surroundings in great detail. How the brain is able to form these richly detailed representations of the world so quickly is one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in the study of vision. Scientists who study the brain have tried to replicate this phenomenon using computer models […] More
MIT researchers have invented a way to integrate “breadboards” — flat platforms widely used for electronics prototyping — directly onto physical products. The aim is to provide a faster, easier way to test circuit functions and user interactions with products such as smart devices and flexible electronics. Breadboards are rectangular boards with arrays of pinholes […] More
Introductory statistics courses teach us that, when fitting a model to some data, we should have more data than free parameters to avoid the danger of overfitting — fitting noisy data too closely, and thereby failing to fit new data. It is surprising, then, that in modern deep learning the practice is to have orders […] More
Over the last century, scientists have developed methods to map the structures within the Earth’s crust, in order to identify resources such as oil reserves, geothermal sources, and, more recently, reservoirs where excess carbon dioxide could potentially be sequestered. They do so by tracking seismic waves that are produced naturally by earthquakes or artificially via […] More
Car companies have been feverishly working to improve the technologies behind self-driving cars. But so far even the most high-tech vehicles still fail when it comes to safely navigating in rain and snow. This is because these weather conditions wreak havoc on the most common approaches for sensing, which usually involve either lidar sensors or […] More
