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Making machines that can listen

The crack of a bat accompanied by a roar from the crowd can capture a baseball fan’s attention, even if they miss seeing the home run. Humans may be visual creatures, but we also perceive the world around us by listening to it. To improve artificial perception, MIT Professor Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01 seeks

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Using AI to mitigate the growing environmental threat of data centers

The global building boom of power-hungry data centers is straining electrical grids, causing greater reliance on energy from polluting fossil fuels.Christina Delimitrou, a newly tenured associate professor at MIT, is fighting this environmental threat by rethinking how the computer servers and networking equipment inside those data centers operate. She and her group apply machine learning to

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Computational tools for society’s most complex challenges

As far back as she can remember, Cathy Wu ’12, MNG ’13 wanted to find ways to solve problems to improve people’s lives. Her parents were Taiwanese immigrants, and her father had a long commute to his job, which took him away from the family. On a tight budget, the rest of the family often

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Measure by measure, studying society accurately

Let’s agree at the outset the world is a complicated place, and social scientists have exacting jobs when it comes to measuring civic phenomena with precision. After all, even careful studies raise follow-up questions: How much do their findings apply in other settings? Do conclusions about politics in one country apply to other countries? If you’re

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Ila Kumar: Innovating with communities

Before Ila Kumar thinks about how to build technology, she asks a different question: What is the context that technology will operate in, and who needs to be involved in the design? For Kumar, meaningful innovation doesn’t result from engineers or designers working in isolation. Instead, she believes the best innovations emerge when the people who

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Working to automate nuclear plant operations

For nuclear to be considered as a viable clean energy source, it has to be competitively priced and economical to produce. Lauren Fortier, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is helping the cause by developing remote operation protocols for autonomous control of nuclear plants. After an undergraduate degree in materials

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Following the questions where they lead

Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farmland in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her own selective, yet wide-ranging, curiosity. Describing her young self as spirited and a bit unruly, she directed her energies to everything from building booby traps to doing experimental construction projects to exploring an intense interest in

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Helping AI models to meet the real world

Systems using artificial intelligence to enhance forecasting, planning, and decision-making in businesses have been proliferating in recent years, but in many cases, they lack the detailed, specific information about the organization itself, limiting the usefulness of those tools. Devavrat Shah, a principal investigator at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), faculty member with the

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When silence is safer: a review and decision-theoretic framework for LLM abstention in healthcare

Large language models (LLMs) are designed to generate answers to user prompts, which often drives them to respond even when uncertainty is high, information is incomplete, or a refusal would be more appropriate. In healthcare, this tendency can be dangerous: confidently stated but inaccurate medical advice can cause significant harm, making the ability to abstain

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Building AI models that understand chemical principles

Among all of the possible chemical compounds, it’s estimated that between 1020 and 1060 may hold potential as small-molecule drugs.Evaluating each of those compounds experimentally would be far too time-consuming for chemists. So, in recent years, researchers have begun using artificial intelligence to help identify compounds that could make good drug candidates. One of those researchers is MIT

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