Browsing: AI News & Trends

On April 30, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative hosted a full-day research symposium examining how artificial intelligence is shaping the world and its implications for society. The symposium included research talks by SERC’s latest seed grant recipients on topics such as air pollution forecasting and responsible computer vision deployment, panels on AI alignment and AI in education, and a keynote address by Jon Kleinberg PhD ’96, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. The event also featured a poster session, where student researchers showcased projects they worked on throughout the year as SERC Scholars.“There is…

MIT, in collaboration with Georgia State University and a growing network of educational institutions, has announced expanded work under PATH (Pathways for AI Training and Hiring) — a multiyear initiative designed to scale effective, affordable, industry-aligned AI training for entry-level and current workers, with a particular focus on transforming community colleges into engines powering an AI-enabled workforce for the nation. “In the era of AI, economic opportunity and mobility will increasingly depend on whether people can develop practical, industry-relevant AI skill sets and mindsets, not just familiarity with tools,” says Cynthia Breazeal, principal investigator (PI) of PATH and professor of media…

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 interdisciplinary community around a central premise: that AI can open new ways of doing physics, while physics can help mold better AI systems. Launched in 2020 as part of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program, IAIFI brings together researchers from MIT, along with Harvard, Northeastern,…

Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media, faculty director of the MIT Media Lab, and director of the Opera of the Future research group, will receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music and Dance in America — the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. As a composer and music tech pioneer, Machover has helped expand music’s possibilities for artists and audiences alike through his work in participatory opera, artificial intelligence, and creative technologies. He joins a roster of previous George Peabody Medal recipients that includes Stevie Wonder, Misty…

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 environments, which LMs struggle with.Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) peered deeper into LMs to understand their main issues in high-stakes settings. Their test: “Battleship,” a classic guessing game that’s helped…

To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports.But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding. A company that invests in a state-of-the-art model might still receive inaccurate or incomplete information.To fill this performance gap, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab developed a multifaceted resource for AI users that is specifically designed to teach vision-language models (VLMs) how to…

Dear hiring leaders and recruiters, there is a part of technical hiring you will not find in any process document: the quiet work of interpretation that you carry every day. As technical roles have become more specialized, success depends not just on defining the job on paper but on translating a hiring manager’s full intent  including the technical nuance behind the role into consistent screening and evaluation across the process. Talent acquisition spends a lot of time talking about speed, quality, and efficiency. But we talk far less about the amount of guesswork still built into the earliest stages of…

MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, which will be open to researchers across the region. With the new funding from the state, which will match federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute aims to begin construction on the QSL facility this summer. The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains, including life sciences and national defense.Quantum technologies promise transformative changes in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration.…

At any given time, technology does two things to employment: It replaces traditional jobs, and it creates new lines of work. Machines replace farmers, but enable, say, aeronautical engineers to exist. So, if tech creates new jobs, who gets them? How well do they pay? How long do new jobs remain new, before they become just another common task any worker can do?A new study of U.S. employment led by MIT labor economist David Autor sheds light on all these matters. In the postwar U.S., as Autor and his colleagues show in granular detail, new forms of work have tended…

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 Associate Professor Connor Coley PhD ’19, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor with shared appointments in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. His research straddles the line between chemical engineering and…