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      Advancing technology for aquaculture

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      According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, aquaculture in the United States represents a $1.5 billion industry annually. Like land-based farming, shellfish aquaculture requires healthy seed production in order to maintain a sustainable industry. Aquaculture hatchery production of shellfish larvae — seeds — requires close monitoring to track mortality rates and assess health from the earliest stages of life. 

      Careful observation is necessary to inform production scheduling, determine effects of naturally occurring harmful bacteria, and ensure sustainable seed production. This is an essential step for shellfish hatcheries but is currently a time-consuming manual process prone to human error. 

      With funding from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), MIT Sea Grant is working with Associate Professor Otto Cordero of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor Taskin Padir and Research Scientist Mark Zolotas at the Northeastern University Institute for Experiential Robotics, and others at the Aquaculture Research Corporation (ARC), and the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, to advance technology for the aquaculture industry. Located on Cape Cod, ARC is a leading shellfish hatchery, farm, and wholesaler that plays a vital role in providing high-quality shellfish seed to local and regional growers.

      Two MIT students have joined the effort this semester, working with Robert Vincent, MIT Sea Grant’s assistant director of advisory services, through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). 

      First-year student Unyime Usua and sophomore Santiago Borrego are using microscopy images of shellfish seed from ARC to train machine learning algorithms that will help automate the identification and counting process. The resulting user-friendly image recognition tool aims to aid aquaculturists in differentiating and counting healthy, unhealthy, and dead shellfish larvae, improving accuracy and reducing time and effort.

      Vincent explains that AI is a powerful tool for environmental science that enables researchers, industry, and resource managers to address challenges that have long been pinch points for accurate data collection, analysis, predictions, and streamlining processes. “Funding support from programs like J-WAFS enable us to tackle these problems head-on,” he says. 

      ARC faces challenges with manually quantifying larvae classes, an important step in their seed production process. “When larvae are in their growing stages they are constantly being sized and counted,” explains Cheryl James, ARC larval/juvenile production manager. “This process is critical to encourage optimal growth and strengthen the population.” 

      Developing an automated identification and counting system will help to improve this step in the production process with time and cost benefits. “This is not an easy task,” says Vincent, “but with the guidance of Dr. Zolotas at the Northeastern University Institute for Experiential Robotics and the work of the UROP students, we have made solid progress.” 

      The UROP program benefits both researchers and students. Involving MIT UROP students in developing these types of systems provides insights into AI applications that they might not have considered, providing opportunities to explore, learn, and apply themselves while contributing to solving real challenges.

      Borrego saw this project as an opportunity to apply what he’d learned in class 6.390 (Introduction to Machine Learning) to a real-world issue. “I was starting to form an idea of how computers can see images and extract information from them,” he says. “I wanted to keep exploring that.”

      Usua decided to pursue the project because of the direct industry impacts it could have. “I’m pretty interested in seeing how we can utilize machine learning to make people’s lives easier. We are using AI to help biologists make this counting and identification process easier.” While Usua wasn’t familiar with aquaculture before starting this project, she explains, “Just hearing about the hatcheries that Dr. Vincent was telling us about, it was unfortunate that not a lot of people know what’s going on and the problems that they’re facing.”

      On Cape Cod alone, aquaculture is an $18 million per year industry. But the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries estimates that hatcheries are only able to meet 70–80 percent of seed demand annually, which impacts local growers and economies. Through this project, the partners aim to develop technology that will increase seed production, advance industry capabilities, and help understand and improve the hatchery microbiome.

      Borrego explains the initial challenge of having limited data to work with. “Starting out, we had to go through and label all of the data, but going through that process helped me learn a lot.” In true MIT fashion, he shares his takeaway from the project: “Try to get the best out of what you’re given with the data you have to work with. You’re going to have to adapt and change your strategies depending on what you have.”

      Usua describes her experience going through the research process, communicating in a team, and deciding what approaches to take. “Research is a difficult and long process, but there is a lot to gain from it because it teaches you to look for things on your own and find your own solutions to problems.”

      In addition to increasing seed production and reducing the human labor required in the hatchery process, the collaborators expect this project to contribute to cost savings and technology integration to support one of the most underserved industries in the United States. 

      Borrego and Usua both plan to continue their work for a second semester with MIT Sea Grant. Borrego is interested in learning more about how technology can be used to protect the environment and wildlife. Usua says she hopes to explore more projects related to aquaculture. “It seems like there’s an infinite amount of ways to tackle these issues.” More

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      Using deep learning to image the Earth’s planetary boundary layer

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      Although the troposphere is often thought of as the closest layer of the atmosphere to the Earth’s surface, the planetary boundary layer (PBL) — the lowest layer of the troposphere — is actually the part that most significantly influences weather near the surface. In the 2018 planetary science decadal survey, the PBL was raised as an important scientific issue that has the potential to enhance storm forecasting and improve climate projections.  

      “The PBL is where the surface interacts with the atmosphere, including exchanges of moisture and heat that help lead to severe weather and a changing climate,” says Adam Milstein, a technical staff member in Lincoln Laboratory’s Applied Space Systems Group. “The PBL is also where humans live, and the turbulent movement of aerosols throughout the PBL is important for air quality that influences human health.” 

      Although vital for studying weather and climate, important features of the PBL, such as its height, are difficult to resolve with current technology. In the past four years, Lincoln Laboratory staff have been studying the PBL, focusing on two different tasks: using machine learning to make 3D-scanned profiles of the atmosphere, and resolving the vertical structure of the atmosphere more clearly in order to better predict droughts.  

      This PBL-focused research effort builds on more than a decade of related work on fast, operational neural network algorithms developed by Lincoln Laboratory for NASA missions. These missions include the Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission as well as Aqua, a satellite that collects data about Earth’s water cycle and observes variables such as ocean temperature, precipitation, and water vapor in the atmosphere. These algorithms retrieve temperature and humidity from the satellite instrument data and have been shown to significantly improve the accuracy and usable global coverage of the observations over previous approaches. For TROPICS, the algorithms help retrieve data that are used to characterize a storm’s rapidly evolving structures in near-real time, and for Aqua, it has helped increase forecasting models, drought monitoring, and fire prediction. 

      These operational algorithms for TROPICS and Aqua are based on classic “shallow” neural networks to maximize speed and simplicity, creating a one-dimensional vertical profile for each spectral measurement collected by the instrument over each location. While this approach has improved observations of the atmosphere down to the surface overall, including the PBL, laboratory staff determined that newer “deep” learning techniques that treat the atmosphere over a region of interest as a three-dimensional image are needed to improve PBL details further.

      “We hypothesized that deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques could improve on current approaches by incorporating a better statistical representation of 3D temperature and humidity imagery of the atmosphere into the solutions,” Milstein says. “But it took a while to figure out how to create the best dataset — a mix of real and simulated data; we needed to prepare to train these techniques.”

      The team collaborated with Joseph Santanello of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and William Blackwell, also of the Applied Space Systems Group, in a recent NASA-funded effort showing that these retrieval algorithms can improve PBL detail, including more accurate determination of the PBL height than the previous state of the art. 

      While improved knowledge of the PBL is broadly useful for increasing understanding of climate and weather, one key application is prediction of droughts. According to a Global Drought Snapshot report released last year, droughts are a pressing planetary issue that the global community needs to address. Lack of humidity near the surface, specifically at the level of the PBL, is the leading indicator of drought. While previous studies using remote-sensing techniques have examined the humidity of soil to determine drought risk, studying the atmosphere can help predict when droughts will happen.  

      In an effort funded by Lincoln Laboratory’s Climate Change Initiative, Milstein, along with laboratory staff member Michael Pieper, are working with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to use neural network techniques to improve drought prediction over the continental United States. While the work builds off of existing operational work JPL has done incorporating (in part) the laboratory’s operational “shallow” neural network approach for Aqua, the team believes that this work and the PBL-focused deep learning research work can be combined to further improve the accuracy of drought prediction. 

      “Lincoln Laboratory has been working with NASA for more than a decade on neural network algorithms for estimating temperature and humidity in the atmosphere from space-borne infrared and microwave instruments, including those on the Aqua spacecraft,” Milstein says. “Over that time, we have learned a lot about this problem by working with the science community, including learning about what scientific challenges remain. Our long experience working on this type of remote sensing with NASA scientists, as well as our experience with using neural network techniques, gave us a unique perspective.”

      According to Milstein, the next step for this project is to compare the deep learning results to datasets from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the Department of Energy collected directly in the PBL using radiosondes, a type of instrument flown on a weather balloon. “These direct measurements can be considered a kind of ‘ground truth’ to quantify the accuracy of the techniques we have developed,” Milstein says.

      This improved neural network approach holds promise to demonstrate drought prediction that can exceed the capabilities of existing indicators, Milstein says, and to be a tool that scientists can rely on for decades to come. More

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      Growing our donated organ supply

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      For those in need of one, an organ transplant is a matter of life and death. 

      Every year, the medical procedure gives thousands of people with advanced or end-stage diseases extended life. This “second chance” is heavily dependent on the availability, compatibility, and proximity of a precious resource that can’t be simply bought, grown, or manufactured — at least not yet.

      Instead, organs must be given — cut from one body and implanted into another. And because living organ donation is only viable in certain cases, many organs are only available for donation after the donor’s death.

      Unsurprisingly, the logistical and ethical complexity of distributing a limited number of transplant organs to a growing wait list of patients has received much attention. There’s an important part of the process that has received less focus, however, and which may hold significant untapped potential: organ procurement itself.

      “If you have a donated organ, who should you give it to? This question has been extensively studied in operations research, economics, and even applied computer science,” says Hammaad Adam, a graduate student in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). “But there’s been a lot less research on where that organ comes from in the first place.”

      In the United States, nonprofits called organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, are responsible for finding and evaluating potential donors, interacting with grieving families and hospital administrations, and recovering and delivering organs — all while following the federal laws that serve as both their mandate and guardrails. Recent studies estimate that obstacles and inefficiencies lead to thousands of organs going uncollected every year, even as the demand for transplants continues to grow.

      “There’s been little transparent data on organ procurement,” argues Adam. Working with MIT computer science professors Marzyeh Ghassemi and Ashia Wilson, and in collaboration with stakeholders in organ procurement, Adam led a project to create a dataset called ORCHID: Organ Retrieval and Collection of Health Information for Donation. ORCHID contains a decade of clinical, financial, and administrative data from six OPOs.

      “Our goal is for the ORCHID database to have an impact in how organ procurement is understood, internally and externally,” says Ghassemi.

      Efficiency and equity 

      It was looking to make an impact that drew Adam to SES and MIT. With a background in applied math and experience in strategy consulting, solving problems with technical components sits right in his wheelhouse.

      “I really missed challenging technical problems from a statistics and machine learning standpoint,” he says of his time in consulting. “So I went back and got a master’s in data science, and over the course of my master’s got involved in a bunch of academic research projects in a few different fields, including biology, management science, and public policy. What I enjoyed most were some of the more social science-focused projects that had immediate impact.”

      As a grad student in SES, Adam’s research focuses on using statistical tools to uncover health-care inequities, and developing machine learning approaches to address them. “Part of my dissertation research focuses on building tools that can improve equity in clinical trials and other randomized experiments,” he explains.

      One recent example of Adam’s work: developing a novel method to stop clinical trials early if the treatment has an unintended harmful effect for a minority group of participants. “I’ve also been thinking about ways to increase minority representation in clinical trials through improved patient recruitment,” he adds.

      Racial inequities in health care extend into organ transplantation, where a majority of wait-listed patients are not white — far in excess of their demographic groups’ proportion to the overall population. There are fewer organ donations from many of these communities, due to various obstacles in need of better understanding if they are to be overcome. 

      “My work in organ transplantation began on the allocation side,” explains Adam. “In work under review, we examined the role of race in the acceptance of heart, liver, and lung transplant offers by physicians on behalf of their patients. We found that Black race of the patient was associated with significantly lower odds of organ offer acceptance — in other words, transplant doctors seemed more likely to turn down organs offered to Black patients. This trend may have multiple explanations, but it is nevertheless concerning.”

      Adam’s research has also found that donor-candidate race match was associated with significantly higher odds of offer acceptance, an association that Adam says “highlights the importance of organ donation from racial minority communities, and has motivated our work on equitable organ procurement.”

      Working with Ghassemi through the IDSS Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism, Adam was introduced to OPO stakeholders looking to collaborate. “It’s this opportunity to impact not only health-care efficiency, but also health-care equity, that really got me interested in this research,” says Adam.

      Play video

      MIT Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism – HealthcareVideo: IDSS

      Making an impact

      Creating a database like ORCHID means solving problems in multiple domains, from the technical to the political. Some efforts never overcome the first step: getting data in the first place. Thankfully, several OPOs were already seeking collaborations and looking to improve their performance.

      “We have been lucky to have a strong partnership with the OPOs, and we hope to work together to find important insights to improve efficiency and equity,” says Ghassemi.

      The value of a database like ORCHID is in its potential for generating new insights, especially through quantitative analysis with statistics and computing tools like machine learning. The potential value in ORCHID was recognized with an MIT Prize for Open Data, an MIT Libraries award highlighting the importance and impact of research data that is openly shared.

      “It’s nice that the work got some recognition,” says Adam of the prize. “And it was cool to see some of the other great open data work that’s happening at MIT. I think there’s real impact in releasing publicly available data in an important and understudied domain.”

      All the same, Adam knows that building the database is only the first step.

      “I’m very interested in understanding the bottlenecks in the organ procurement process,” he explains. “As part of my thesis research, I’m exploring this by modeling OPO decision-making using causal inference and structural econometrics.”

      Using insights from this research, Adam also aims to evaluate policy changes that can improve both equity and efficiency in organ procurement. “And we’re hoping to recruit more OPOs, and increase the amount of data we’re releasing,” he says. “The dream state is every OPO joins our collaboration and provides updated data every year.”

      Adam is excited to see how other researchers might use the data to address inefficiencies in organ procurement. “Every organ donor saves between three and four lives,” he says. “So every research project that comes out of this dataset could make a real impact.” More

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      AI generates high-quality images 30 times faster in a single step

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      In our current age of artificial intelligence, computers can generate their own “art” by way of diffusion models, iteratively adding structure to a noisy initial state until a clear image or video emerges. Diffusion models have suddenly grabbed a seat at everyone’s table: Enter a few words and experience instantaneous, dopamine-spiking dreamscapes at the intersection of reality and fantasy. Behind the scenes, it involves a complex, time-intensive process requiring numerous iterations for the algorithm to perfect the image.

      MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have introduced a new framework that simplifies the multi-step process of traditional diffusion models into a single step, addressing previous limitations. This is done through a type of teacher-student model: teaching a new computer model to mimic the behavior of more complicated, original models that generate images. The approach, known as distribution matching distillation (DMD), retains the quality of the generated images and allows for much faster generation. 

      “Our work is a novel method that accelerates current diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion and DALLE-3 by 30 times,” says Tianwei Yin, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL affiliate, and the lead researcher on the DMD framework. “This advancement not only significantly reduces computational time but also retains, if not surpasses, the quality of the generated visual content. Theoretically, the approach marries the principles of generative adversarial networks (GANs) with those of diffusion models, achieving visual content generation in a single step — a stark contrast to the hundred steps of iterative refinement required by current diffusion models. It could potentially be a new generative modeling method that excels in speed and quality.”

      This single-step diffusion model could enhance design tools, enabling quicker content creation and potentially supporting advancements in drug discovery and 3D modeling, where promptness and efficacy are key.

      Distribution dreams

      DMD cleverly has two components. First, it uses a regression loss, which anchors the mapping to ensure a coarse organization of the space of images to make training more stable. Next, it uses a distribution matching loss, which ensures that the probability to generate a given image with the student model corresponds to its real-world occurrence frequency. To do this, it leverages two diffusion models that act as guides, helping the system understand the difference between real and generated images and making training the speedy one-step generator possible.

      The system achieves faster generation by training a new network to minimize the distribution divergence between its generated images and those from the training dataset used by traditional diffusion models. “Our key insight is to approximate gradients that guide the improvement of the new model using two diffusion models,” says Yin. “In this way, we distill the knowledge of the original, more complex model into the simpler, faster one, while bypassing the notorious instability and mode collapse issues in GANs.” 

      Yin and colleagues used pre-trained networks for the new student model, simplifying the process. By copying and fine-tuning parameters from the original models, the team achieved fast training convergence of the new model, which is capable of producing high-quality images with the same architectural foundation. “This enables combining with other system optimizations based on the original architecture to further accelerate the creation process,” adds Yin. 

      When put to the test against the usual methods, using a wide range of benchmarks, DMD showed consistent performance. On the popular benchmark of generating images based on specific classes on ImageNet, DMD is the first one-step diffusion technique that churns out pictures pretty much on par with those from the original, more complex models, rocking a super-close Fréchet inception distance (FID) score of just 0.3, which is impressive, since FID is all about judging the quality and diversity of generated images. Furthermore, DMD excels in industrial-scale text-to-image generation and achieves state-of-the-art one-step generation performance. There’s still a slight quality gap when tackling trickier text-to-image applications, suggesting there’s a bit of room for improvement down the line. 

      Additionally, the performance of the DMD-generated images is intrinsically linked to the capabilities of the teacher model used during the distillation process. In the current form, which uses Stable Diffusion v1.5 as the teacher model, the student inherits limitations such as rendering detailed depictions of text and small faces, suggesting that DMD-generated images could be further enhanced by more advanced teacher models. 

      “Decreasing the number of iterations has been the Holy Grail in diffusion models since their inception,” says Fredo Durand, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL principal investigator, and a lead author on the paper. “We are very excited to finally enable single-step image generation, which will dramatically reduce compute costs and accelerate the process.” 

      “Finally, a paper that successfully combines the versatility and high visual quality of diffusion models with the real-time performance of GANs,” says Alexei Efros, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley who was not involved in this study. “I expect this work to open up fantastic possibilities for high-quality real-time visual editing.” 

      Yin and Durand’s fellow authors are MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor and CSAIL principal investigator William T. Freeman, as well as Adobe research scientists Michaël Gharbi SM ’15, PhD ’18; Richard Zhang; Eli Shechtman; and Taesung Park. Their work was supported, in part, by U.S. National Science Foundation grants (including one for the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions), the Singapore Defense Science and Technology Agency, and by funding from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and Amazon. Their work will be presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June. More

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      New AI model could streamline operations in a robotic warehouse

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      Hundreds of robots zip back and forth across the floor of a colossal robotic warehouse, grabbing items and delivering them to human workers for packing and shipping. Such warehouses are increasingly becoming part of the supply chain in many industries, from e-commerce to automotive production.

      However, getting 800 robots to and from their destinations efficiently while keeping them from crashing into each other is no easy task. It is such a complex problem that even the best path-finding algorithms struggle to keep up with the breakneck pace of e-commerce or manufacturing. 

      In a sense, these robots are like cars trying to navigate a crowded city center. So, a group of MIT researchers who use AI to mitigate traffic congestion applied ideas from that domain to tackle this problem.

      They built a deep-learning model that encodes important information about the warehouse, including the robots, planned paths, tasks, and obstacles, and uses it to predict the best areas of the warehouse to decongest to improve overall efficiency.

      Their technique divides the warehouse robots into groups, so these smaller groups of robots can be decongested faster with traditional algorithms used to coordinate robots. In the end, their method decongests the robots nearly four times faster than a strong random search method.

      In addition to streamlining warehouse operations, this deep learning approach could be used in other complex planning tasks, like computer chip design or pipe routing in large buildings.

      “We devised a new neural network architecture that is actually suitable for real-time operations at the scale and complexity of these warehouses. It can encode hundreds of robots in terms of their trajectories, origins, destinations, and relationships with other robots, and it can do this in an efficient manner that reuses computation across groups of robots,” says Cathy Wu, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), and a member of a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

      Wu, senior author of a paper on this technique, is joined by lead author Zhongxia Yan, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.

      Robotic Tetris

      From a bird’s eye view, the floor of a robotic e-commerce warehouse looks a bit like a fast-paced game of “Tetris.”

      When a customer order comes in, a robot travels to an area of the warehouse, grabs the shelf that holds the requested item, and delivers it to a human operator who picks and packs the item. Hundreds of robots do this simultaneously, and if two robots’ paths conflict as they cross the massive warehouse, they might crash.

      Traditional search-based algorithms avoid potential crashes by keeping one robot on its course and replanning a trajectory for the other. But with so many robots and potential collisions, the problem quickly grows exponentially.

      “Because the warehouse is operating online, the robots are replanned about every 100 milliseconds. That means that every second, a robot is replanned 10 times. So, these operations need to be very fast,” Wu says.

      Because time is so critical during replanning, the MIT researchers use machine learning to focus the replanning on the most actionable areas of congestion — where there exists the most potential to reduce the total travel time of robots.

      Wu and Yan built a neural network architecture that considers smaller groups of robots at the same time. For instance, in a warehouse with 800 robots, the network might cut the warehouse floor into smaller groups that contain 40 robots each.

      Then, it predicts which group has the most potential to improve the overall solution if a search-based solver were used to coordinate trajectories of robots in that group.

      An iterative process, the overall algorithm picks the most promising robot group with the neural network, decongests the group with the search-based solver, then picks the next most promising group with the neural network, and so on.

      Considering relationships

      The neural network can reason about groups of robots efficiently because it captures complicated relationships that exist between individual robots. For example, even though one robot may be far away from another initially, their paths could still cross during their trips.

      The technique also streamlines computation by encoding constraints only once, rather than repeating the process for each subproblem. For instance, in a warehouse with 800 robots, decongesting a group of 40 robots requires holding the other 760 robots as constraints. Other approaches require reasoning about all 800 robots once per group in each iteration.

      Instead, the researchers’ approach only requires reasoning about the 800 robots once across all groups in each iteration.

      “The warehouse is one big setting, so a lot of these robot groups will have some shared aspects of the larger problem. We designed our architecture to make use of this common information,” she adds.

      They tested their technique in several simulated environments, including some set up like warehouses, some with random obstacles, and even maze-like settings that emulate building interiors.

      By identifying more effective groups to decongest, their learning-based approach decongests the warehouse up to four times faster than strong, non-learning-based approaches. Even when they factored in the additional computational overhead of running the neural network, their approach still solved the problem 3.5 times faster.

      In the future, the researchers want to derive simple, rule-based insights from their neural model, since the decisions of the neural network can be opaque and difficult to interpret. Simpler, rule-based methods could also be easier to implement and maintain in actual robotic warehouse settings.

      “This approach is based on a novel architecture where convolution and attention mechanisms interact effectively and efficiently. Impressively, this leads to being able to take into account the spatiotemporal component of the constructed paths without the need of problem-specific feature engineering. The results are outstanding: Not only is it possible to improve on state-of-the-art large neighborhood search methods in terms of quality of the solution and speed, but the model generalizes to unseen cases wonderfully,” says Andrea Lodi, the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor at Cornell Tech, and who was not involved with this research.

      This work was supported by Amazon and the MIT Amazon Science Hub. More

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      Putting AI into the hands of people with problems to solve

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      As Media Lab students in 2010, Karthik Dinakar SM ’12, PhD ’17 and Birago Jones SM ’12 teamed up for a class project to build a tool that would help content moderation teams at companies like Twitter (now X) and YouTube. The project generated a huge amount of excitement, and the researchers were invited to give a demonstration at a cyberbullying summit at the White House — they just had to get the thing working.

      The day before the White House event, Dinakar spent hours trying to put together a working demo that could identify concerning posts on Twitter. Around 11 p.m., he called Jones to say he was giving up.

      Then Jones decided to look at the data. It turned out Dinakar’s model was flagging the right types of posts, but the posters were using teenage slang terms and other indirect language that Dinakar didn’t pick up on. The problem wasn’t the model; it was the disconnect between Dinakar and the teens he was trying to help.

      “We realized then, right before we got to the White House, that the people building these models should not be folks who are just machine-learning engineers,” Dinakar says. “They should be people who best understand their data.”

      The insight led the researchers to develop point-and-click tools that allow nonexperts to build machine-learning models. Those tools became the basis for Pienso, which today is helping people build large language models for detecting misinformation, human trafficking, weapons sales, and more, without writing any code.

      “These kinds of applications are important to us because our roots are in cyberbullying and understanding how to use AI for things that really help humanity,” says Jones.

      As for the early version of the system shown at the White House, the founders ended up collaborating with students at nearby schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to let them train the models.

      “The models those kids trained were so much better and nuanced than anything I could’ve ever come up with,” Dinakar says. “Birago and I had this big ‘Aha!’ moment where we realized empowering domain experts — which is different from democratizing AI — was the best path forward.”

      A project with purpose

      Jones and Dinakar met as graduate students in the Software Agents research group of the MIT Media Lab. Their work on what became Pienso started in Course 6.864 (Natural Language Processing) and continued until they earned their master’s degrees in 2012.

      It turned out 2010 wasn’t the last time the founders were invited to the White House to demo their project. The work generated a lot of enthusiasm, but the founders worked on Pienso part time until 2016, when Dinakar finished his PhD at MIT and deep learning began to explode in popularity.

      “We’re still connected to many people around campus,” Dinakar says. “The exposure we had at MIT, the melding of human and computer interfaces, widened our understanding. Our philosophy at Pienso couldn’t be possible without the vibrancy of MIT’s campus.”

      The founders also credit MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) and Startup Accelerator (STEX) for connecting them to early partners.

      One early partner was SkyUK. The company’s customer success team used Pienso to build models to understand their customer’s most common problems. Today those models are helping to process half a million customer calls a day, and the founders say they have saved the company over £7 million pounds to date by shortening the length of calls into the company’s call center.

      “The difference between democratizing AI and empowering people with AI comes down to who understands the data best — you or a doctor or a journalist or someone who works with customers every day?” Jones says. “Those are the people who should be creating the models. That’s how you get insights out of your data.”

      In 2020, just as Covid-19 outbreaks began in the U.S., government officials contacted the founders to use their tool to better understand the emerging disease. Pienso helped experts in virology and infectious disease set up machine-learning models to mine thousands of research articles about coronaviruses. Dinakar says they later learned the work helped the government identify and strengthen critical supply chains for drugs, including the popular antiviral remdesivir.

      “Those compounds were surfaced by a team that did not know deep learning but was able to use our platform,” Dinakar says.

      Building a better AI future

      Because Pienso can run on internal servers and cloud infrastructure, the founders say it offers an alternative for businesses being forced to donate their data by using services offered by other AI companies.

      “The Pienso interface is a series of web apps stitched together,” Dinakar explains. “You can think of it like an Adobe Photoshop for large language models, but in the web. You can point and import data without writing a line of code. You can refine the data, prepare it for deep learning, analyze it, give it structure if it’s not labeled or annotated, and you can walk away with fine-tuned, large language model in a matter of 25 minutes.”

      Earlier this year, Pienso announced a partnership with GraphCore, which provides a faster, more efficient computing platform for machine learning. The founders say the partnership will further lower barriers to leveraging AI by dramatically reducing latency.

      “If you’re building an interactive AI platform, users aren’t going to have a cup of coffee every time they click a button,” Dinakar says. “It needs to be fast and responsive.”

      The founders believe their solution is enabling a future where more effective AI models are developed for specific use cases by the people who are most familiar with the problems they are trying to solve.

      “No one model can do everything,” Dinakar says. “Everyone’s application is different, their needs are different, their data is different. It’s highly unlikely that one model will do everything for you. It’s about bringing a garden of models together and allowing them to collaborate with each other and orchestrating them in a way that makes sense — and the people doing that orchestration should be the people who understand the data best.” More

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      How symmetry can come to the aid of machine learning

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      Behrooz Tahmasebi — an MIT PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and an affiliate of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — was taking a mathematics course on differential equations in late 2021 when a glimmer of inspiration struck. In that class, he learned for the first time about Weyl’s law, which had been formulated 110 years earlier by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl. Tahmasebi realized it might have some relevance to the computer science problem he was then wrestling with, even though the connection appeared — on the surface — to be thin, at best. Weyl’s law, he says, provides a formula that measures the complexity of the spectral information, or data, contained within the fundamental frequencies of a drum head or guitar string.

      Tahmasebi was, at the same time, thinking about measuring the complexity of the input data to a neural network, wondering whether that complexity could be reduced by taking into account some of the symmetries inherent to the dataset. Such a reduction, in turn, could facilitate — as well as speed up — machine learning processes.

      Weyl’s law, conceived about a century before the boom in machine learning, had traditionally been applied to very different physical situations — such as those concerning the vibrations of a string or the spectrum of electromagnetic (black-body) radiation given off by a heated object. Nevertheless, Tahmasebi believed that a customized version of that law might help with the machine learning problem he was pursuing. And if the approach panned out, the payoff could be considerable.

      He spoke with his advisor, Stefanie Jegelka — an associate professor in EECS and affiliate of CSAIL and the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society — who believed the idea was definitely worth looking into. As Tahmasebi saw it, Weyl’s law had to do with gauging the complexity of data, and so did this project. But Weyl’s law, in its original form, said nothing about symmetry.

      He and Jegelka have now succeeded in modifying Weyl’s law so that symmetry can be factored into the assessment of a dataset’s complexity. “To the best of my knowledge,” Tahmasebi says, “this is the first time Weyl’s law has been used to determine how machine learning can be enhanced by symmetry.”

      The paper he and Jegelka wrote earned a “Spotlight” designation when it was presented at the December 2023 conference on Neural Information Processing Systems — widely regarded as the world’s top conference on machine learning.

      This work, comments Soledad Villar, an applied mathematician at Johns Hopkins University, “shows that models that satisfy the symmetries of the problem are not only correct but also can produce predictions with smaller errors, using a small amount of training points. [This] is especially important in scientific domains, like computational chemistry, where training data can be scarce.”

      In their paper, Tahmasebi and Jegelka explored the ways in which symmetries, or so-called “invariances,” could benefit machine learning. Suppose, for example, the goal of a particular computer run is to pick out every image that contains the numeral 3. That task can be a lot easier, and go a lot quicker, if the algorithm can identify the 3 regardless of where it is placed in the box — whether it’s exactly in the center or off to the side — and whether it is pointed right-side up, upside down, or oriented at a random angle. An algorithm equipped with the latter capability can take advantage of the symmetries of translation and rotations, meaning that a 3, or any other object, is not changed in itself by altering its position or by rotating it around an arbitrary axis. It is said to be invariant to those shifts. The same logic can be applied to algorithms charged with identifying dogs or cats. A dog is a dog is a dog, one might say, irrespective of how it is embedded within an image. 

      The point of the entire exercise, the authors explain, is to exploit a dataset’s intrinsic symmetries in order to reduce the complexity of machine learning tasks. That, in turn, can lead to a reduction in the amount of data needed for learning. Concretely, the new work answers the question: How many fewer data are needed to train a machine learning model if the data contain symmetries?

      There are two ways of achieving a gain, or benefit, by capitalizing on the symmetries present. The first has to do with the size of the sample to be looked at. Let’s imagine that you are charged, for instance, with analyzing an image that has mirror symmetry — the right side being an exact replica, or mirror image, of the left. In that case, you don’t have to look at every pixel; you can get all the information you need from half of the image — a factor of two improvement. If, on the other hand, the image can be partitioned into 10 identical parts, you can get a factor of 10 improvement. This kind of boosting effect is linear.

      To take another example, imagine you are sifting through a dataset, trying to find sequences of blocks that have seven different colors — black, blue, green, purple, red, white, and yellow. Your job becomes much easier if you don’t care about the order in which the blocks are arranged. If the order mattered, there would be 5,040 different combinations to look for. But if all you care about are sequences of blocks in which all seven colors appear, then you have reduced the number of things — or sequences — you are searching for from 5,040 to just one.

      Tahmasebi and Jegelka discovered that it is possible to achieve a different kind of gain — one that is exponential — that can be reaped for symmetries that operate over many dimensions. This advantage is related to the notion that the complexity of a learning task grows exponentially with the dimensionality of the data space. Making use of a multidimensional symmetry can therefore yield a disproportionately large return. “This is a new contribution that is basically telling us that symmetries of higher dimension are more important because they can give us an exponential gain,” Tahmasebi says. 

      The NeurIPS 2023 paper that he wrote with Jegelka contains two theorems that were proved mathematically. “The first theorem shows that an improvement in sample complexity is achievable with the general algorithm we provide,” Tahmasebi says. The second theorem complements the first, he added, “showing that this is the best possible gain you can get; nothing else is achievable.”

      He and Jegelka have provided a formula that predicts the gain one can obtain from a particular symmetry in a given application. A virtue of this formula is its generality, Tahmasebi notes. “It works for any symmetry and any input space.” It works not only for symmetries that are known today, but it could also be applied in the future to symmetries that are yet to be discovered. The latter prospect is not too farfetched to consider, given that the search for new symmetries has long been a major thrust in physics. That suggests that, as more symmetries are found, the methodology introduced by Tahmasebi and Jegelka should only get better over time.

      According to Haggai Maron, a computer scientist at Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology) and NVIDIA who was not involved in the work, the approach presented in the paper “diverges substantially from related previous works, adopting a geometric perspective and employing tools from differential geometry. This theoretical contribution lends mathematical support to the emerging subfield of ‘Geometric Deep Learning,’ which has applications in graph learning, 3D data, and more. The paper helps establish a theoretical basis to guide further developments in this rapidly expanding research area.” More

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      in Data Management & Statistics

      New hope for early pancreatic cancer intervention via AI-based risk prediction

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      The first documented case of pancreatic cancer dates back to the 18th century. Since then, researchers have undertaken a protracted and challenging odyssey to understand the elusive and deadly disease. To date, there is no better cancer treatment than early intervention. Unfortunately, the pancreas, nestled deep within the abdomen, is particularly elusive for early detection. 

      MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) scientists, alongside Limor Appelbaum, a staff scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), were eager to better identify potential high-risk patients. They set out to develop two machine-learning models for early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common form of the cancer. To access a broad and diverse database, the team synced up with a federated network company, using electronic health record data from various institutions across the United States. This vast pool of data helped ensure the models’ reliability and generalizability, making them applicable across a wide range of populations, geographical locations, and demographic groups.

      The two models — the “PRISM” neural network, and the logistic regression model (a statistical technique for probability), outperformed current methods. The team’s comparison showed that while standard screening criteria identify about 10 percent of PDAC cases using a five-times higher relative risk threshold, Prism can detect 35 percent of PDAC cases at this same threshold. 

      Using AI to detect cancer risk is not a new phenomena — algorithms analyze mammograms, CT scans for lung cancer, and assist in the analysis of Pap smear tests and HPV testing, to name a few applications. “The PRISM models stand out for their development and validation on an extensive database of over 5 million patients, surpassing the scale of most prior research in the field,” says Kai Jia, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), MIT CSAIL affiliate, and first author on an open-access paper in eBioMedicine outlining the new work. “The model uses routine clinical and lab data to make its predictions, and the diversity of the U.S. population is a significant advancement over other PDAC models, which are usually confined to specific geographic regions, like a few health-care centers in the U.S. Additionally, using a unique regularization technique in the training process enhanced the models’ generalizability and interpretability.” 

      “This report outlines a powerful approach to use big data and artificial intelligence algorithms to refine our approach to identifying risk profiles for cancer,” says David Avigan, a Harvard Medical School professor and the cancer center director and chief of hematology and hematologic malignancies at BIDMC, who was not involved in the study. “This approach may lead to novel strategies to identify patients with high risk for malignancy that may benefit from focused screening with the potential for early intervention.” 

      Prismatic perspectives

      The journey toward the development of PRISM began over six years ago, fueled by firsthand experiences with the limitations of current diagnostic practices. “Approximately 80-85 percent of pancreatic cancer patients are diagnosed at advanced stages, where cure is no longer an option,” says senior author Appelbaum, who is also a Harvard Medical School instructor as well as radiation oncologist. “This clinical frustration sparked the idea to delve into the wealth of data available in electronic health records (EHRs).”The CSAIL group’s close collaboration with Appelbaum made it possible to understand the combined medical and machine learning aspects of the problem better, eventually leading to a much more accurate and transparent model. “The hypothesis was that these records contained hidden clues — subtle signs and symptoms that could act as early warning signals of pancreatic cancer,” she adds. “This guided our use of federated EHR networks in developing these models, for a scalable approach for deploying risk prediction tools in health care.”Both PrismNN and PrismLR models analyze EHR data, including patient demographics, diagnoses, medications, and lab results, to assess PDAC risk. PrismNN uses artificial neural networks to detect intricate patterns in data features like age, medical history, and lab results, yielding a risk score for PDAC likelihood. PrismLR uses logistic regression for a simpler analysis, generating a probability score of PDAC based on these features. Together, the models offer a thorough evaluation of different approaches in predicting PDAC risk from the same EHR data.

      One paramount point for gaining the trust of physicians, the team notes, is better understanding how the models work, known in the field as interpretability. The scientists pointed out that while logistic regression models are inherently easier to interpret, recent advancements have made deep neural networks somewhat more transparent. This helped the team to refine the thousands of potentially predictive features derived from EHR of a single patient to approximately 85 critical indicators. These indicators, which include patient age, diabetes diagnosis, and an increased frequency of visits to physicians, are automatically discovered by the model but match physicians’ understanding of risk factors associated with pancreatic cancer. 

      The path forward

      Despite the promise of the PRISM models, as with all research, some parts are still a work in progress. U.S. data alone are the current diet for the models, necessitating testing and adaptation for global use. The path forward, the team notes, includes expanding the model’s applicability to international datasets and integrating additional biomarkers for more refined risk assessment.

      “A subsequent aim for us is to facilitate the models’ implementation in routine health care settings. The vision is to have these models function seamlessly in the background of health care systems, automatically analyzing patient data and alerting physicians to high-risk cases without adding to their workload,” says Jia. “A machine-learning model integrated with the EHR system could empower physicians with early alerts for high-risk patients, potentially enabling interventions well before symptoms manifest. We are eager to deploy our techniques in the real world to help all individuals enjoy longer, healthier lives.” 

      Jia wrote the paper alongside Applebaum and MIT EECS Professor and CSAIL Principal Investigator Martin Rinard, who are both senior authors of the paper. Researchers on the paper were supported during their time at MIT CSAIL, in part, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Boeing, the National Science Foundation, and Aarno Labs. TriNetX provided resources for the project, and the Prevent Cancer Foundation also supported the team. More