Browsing: AI News & Trends

Companies working at the frontier of aerospace, energy, and computing are constantly looking for new materials to improve performance. But in order to understand how those materials will actually behave once they’re inside rockets or on computer chips, companies first have to make the material and then test it. That’s because even the most powerful simulation techniques struggle to model the complex chemical arrangements in most of today’s solid materials. The problem adds costs and time to materials innovation.Now a team of MIT researchers has created a way to accurately model the behavior of metals, regardless of the complexity of…

On June 9, The Boston Globe released its 2026 “Tech Power Players” list, recognizing 50 influential local leaders in technology and business across Massachusetts. The list includes eight MIT affiliates including President Sally Kornbluth, Prof. Daniela Rus (director of CSAIL), Prof. Regina Barzilay, Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang, Prof. Max Tegmark, Ana Bakshi (executive director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship), Katie Rae CEO and Managing Partner of Engine Ventures), and Senior Lecturer Brian Halligan, along with a number of MIT alumni.In addition to recognizing individual leaders, the Power Players coverage highlights MIT’s research labs, its culture of innovation and entrepreneurship,…

Whether you’re playing poker against a single opponent or find yourself in a bidding war over a home purchase with another prospective buyer, you are operating under conditions of imperfect information. You know what cards you’re holding in the poker game, and you also know how much above the home’s asking price you can afford, but you don’t know your opponent’s hand in the card game or how high the other home buyer is willing to go. A paper co-authored by MIT researchers and presented in April at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Rio De Janeiro won’t tell you…

An auto factory worker can remember the storage bin where she left a partly assembled component the night before, and quickly return to that spot to pick it up. But robots that may work side-by-side with her would struggle to develop and access this same type of “spatiotemporal” memory.Now, MIT researchers have developed a long-term memory framework that allows robots to rapidly form and recall a detailed mental model of complicated, large-scale environments.In the future, this advance could allow the factory worker to send a robotic assistant to fetch the item, simply by asking it to “go and grab the…

In May, the Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) marked its first anniversary with MIT Manufacturing Week, four days of events that attracted more than 800 registrants including students, faculty, industry leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, and government officials to explore topics ranging from how companies are using AI on factory floors to the role of startups in introducing innovation to new workforce solutions to address the worker shortage.“INM launched a year ago with the premise that strengthening the industrial base needed a coordinated response, and MIT has a responsibility to lead it,” says Paula T. Hammond, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering…

In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to them, even though they cannot assign a particular number to that choice. Thurstone was a pioneer of “psychometrics” — a field built upon the premise that mental processes, which we cannot see, can nevertheless be measured and quantified. His 1927 paper laid the groundwork for what are now called random utility models, which provide a mathematical framework for describing human preferences — information that can…

Jinhua Zhao MCP ’04, SM ’04, PhD ’09 has been appointed head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), effective July 1. Zhao is the Class of 1941 Professor of Cities and Transportation at MIT.In making the announcement, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis noted that Zhao is a renowned transportation planner, educator, and scholar, and a world leader in imagining and shaping better futures for mobility.“Jinhua is one of those rare scholars who moves seamlessly between cutting-edge research and real-world policy,” says Sarkis. “His work with governments and transportation agencies around the world is a model…

The Hertz Foundation announced that it awarded 2026 fellowships to three current MIT students as well as an incoming graduate student. They are: Annika Marschner, Alvin Q. Meng, Zachary S. Siegel, and Matthew Wanta.The prestigious science and technology award provides each recipient with five years of financial support — a stipend and full tuition equivalent — which gives them an unusual measure of autonomy to pursue ground-breaking research in their graduate work.“What particularly impresses me about this cohort is their fearlessness in taking on new challenges and advancing the frontiers of science,” says Philip Welkhoff, a Hertz Fellow and director of the malaria program…

The rise of artificial intelligence is riding on the back of an enormous data center expansion. Data centers are projected to account for anywhere from 9 to 17 percent of total electricity usage in the U.S. by the end of the decade. Today, around a third of data center electricity is devoted to cooling the chips that run AI models.That’s the process Ferveret is working to make more efficient. The startup, founded by Reza Azizian, a former MIT postdoc in nuclear engineering, and Matteo Bucci, MIT’s Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and…

It’s no secret that the last few years have seen a massive explosion in the use of artificial intelligence for general information-gathering. An even more recent trend, though, is how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are increasingly being used for verifying and consuming news; reports from the Pew Research Center over the last year found that one-in-five U.S. teens regularly use LLMs to get their news, while one-in-four young adults have reported using them for that purpose at least once. A new open-access study from the MIT Media Lab should give some of those users pause: Researchers found that, over the…