National Science Foundation (NSF)

Auto Added by WPeMatico

AI helps design new materials that work in the real world

Today, anyone with a large enough artificial intelligence model can generate millions of new material designs in minutes. Unfortunately, that hasn’t led to a huge leap in the number of new materials being used to improve the performance of products like computer chips and rockets.One reason for the translation gap is that current models don’t […]

AI helps design new materials that work in the real world Read More »

Solving the solvent problem

Lithium-ion batteries are the leading choice in today’s electric vehicle and battery energy storage system industries, but they contain a number of critical minerals — including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite — that are considered essential for economic and national security reasons, and therefore vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. As renewable energy, electrified infrastructure, and

Solving the solvent problem Read More »

Connecting research to policy on Capitol Hill

This spring, 25 MIT students and postdocs traveled to Washington to meet with congressional staffers and advocate for sustained federal investment in scientific research. With recent cuts to National Science Foundation programs and continued uncertainty surrounding the federal research budget, these conversations were especially timely. Over the course of just two days, participants met with 62

Connecting research to policy on Capitol Hill Read More »

AI agents create virtual playgrounds to help robots get crucial training data

Robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers, is an increasingly common sight. But these machines aren’t yet the do-it-all assistants you’d want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it’s labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach

AI agents create virtual playgrounds to help robots get crucial training data Read More »

Jesse Thaler named director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science

Professor Jesse Thaler has been named director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), effective Aug. 1. He succeeds Professor Bolek Wyslouch, who directed LNS for the past decade. Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who combines techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics. “In his research,

Jesse Thaler named director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science Read More »

New chip could help tiny robots traverse complex environments

A new chip developed by MIT researchers could help tiny, low-power UAVs avoid obstacles as they zip around tight corners inside an industrial HVAC system to check for gas leaks.The chip allows small autonomous robots and other battery-limited devices to construct detailed 3D maps of their environments in real-time using only about as much power

New chip could help tiny robots traverse complex environments Read More »

NSF renews support for MIT-led AI and physics institute, expanding a new model for discovery

The MIT-led Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) has received renewed support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for an additional five years, increasing annual funding from $4 million to $4.98 million. The renewal marks a new phase for IAIFI, which has spent its first five years building a research model and an

NSF renews support for MIT-led AI and physics institute, expanding a new model for discovery Read More »

Teaching AI agents to ask better questions by playing “Battleship”

In 2026, the hype for artificial intelligence agents is louder than ever before. These semi-autonomous programs can “think” and execute well-defined tasks in areas like customer service and software development, typically using language models (LMs). But fields like medical diagnosis and scientific discovery require them to inquire about a vast range of solutions in uncertain

Teaching AI agents to ask better questions by playing “Battleship” Read More »

Solving the “Whac-a-mole dilemma”: A smarter way to debias AI vision models

In today’s hospitals and clinics, a dermatologist may use an artificial intelligence model for classifying skin lesions to assess if the lesion is at risk of developing into a cancer or if it is benign. But if the model is biased toward certain skin tones, it could fail to identify a high-risk patient.Perhaps one of

Solving the “Whac-a-mole dilemma”: A smarter way to debias AI vision models Read More »

MIT scientists build the world’s largest collection of Olympiad-level math problems, and open it to everyone

Every year, the countries competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) arrive with a booklet of their best, most original problems. Those booklets get shared among delegations, then quietly disappear. No one had ever collected them systematically, cleaned them, and made them available, not for AI researchers testing the limits of mathematical reasoning, and not

MIT scientists build the world’s largest collection of Olympiad-level math problems, and open it to everyone Read More »