Browsing: AI News & Trends

The human brain remains one of the most fascinating and perplexing mysteries in medicine. Scientists still struggle to match neurological activity with brain function and detect problems early, slowing efforts to treat neurological disorders and other diseases.Beacon Biosignals is working to make sense of the brain by monitoring its activity while people sleep. The company, which was founded by Jake Donoghue PhD ’19 and former MIT researcher Jarrett Revels, developed a lightweight headband that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to measure brain activity while people enjoy their normal sleep routines at home. Those data are processed by machine-learning algorithms to monitor…

When she was a child, MIT senior Olivia Honeycutt would spend summers on her grandparents’ farm in rural Alabama outside Birmingham. The practical and cultural differences between farm and city life became more pronounced by comparison. “Life and the way we lived it slowed down on the farm,” she says. “It was a nice change of pace.” These days, Honeycutt, a double major in computation and cognition and linguistics, still finds herself moving between several worlds that are simultaneously connected and distinctly different. Her research interests lie at the intersection of human thinking and awareness, language learning and acquisition, technology, and social group…

“The thing that really struck me when I came to MIT and strikes me every single day is the stuff that’s going on here is amazing. The science, the engineering… every day I hear something that makes my jaw drop,” remarked President Sally Kornbluth during a live discussion with Lizzie O’Leary of Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast.Kornbluth spoke about everything from the importance of curiosity-driven science and why basic science is critical to our nation’s future, to AI and education, and even bravely joined O’Leary in a rendition of the Williams College song, “The Mountains,” in honor of their shared…

DeepSeek’s latest AI model was poised for a major launch. And yet, the markets did not react as expected to the release of DeepSeek’s V4 preview, despite the Chinese startup making technical headway with its latest software.Investors are less likely to swoon at the announcement of a more powerful, more efficient, and less expensive AI model. They know what we mean, and they’re waiting for it to do something impressive.This is not to imply that DeepSeek failed at its most recent endeavor, because it clearly did not. While its latest model has outperformed predecessors, it still solidifies China’s position in…

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 the best known and most persistent challenges that AI research continues to reckon with is bias. Bias is often discussed in relation to training data, but model architecture can also contain and amplify bias, negatively influencing model performance in real-world settings. In high-stakes medical scenarios,…

The following is a joint announcement by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and IBM.IBM and MIT today announced the launch of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, advancing their long-standing collaboration to shape the next era of computing. The new lab expands its scope to include quantum computing, alongside foundational artificial intelligence research, with the goal of unlocking new computational approaches that go beyond the limits of today’s classical systems.The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab builds on a distinguished history of scientific excellence at the intersection of research and academia. Evolving from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which originated in 2017…

South Africa has had its first draft national artificial intelligence policy removed following the discovery of fictitious citations in the document that appeared to be AI generated.The recall, which has emerged after the draft policy’s phony references were exposed, is more than a bureaucratic blip; it’s precisely the sort of gaffe that might cause a person to drop their mug halfway to their lips.You have to ask yourself: Wait, the policy that is meant to regulate AI just got undermined by AI? That’s embarrassing, to be sure, but also instructive in that it’s a cautionary tale.South African communications and digital…

A new method developed by MIT researchers can accelerate a privacy-preserving artificial intelligence training method by about 81 percent. This advance could enable a wider array of resource-constrained edge devices, like sensors and smartwatches, to deploy more accurate AI models while keeping user data secure.The MIT researchers boosted the efficiency of a technique known as federated learning, which involves a network of connected devices that work together to train a shared AI model.In federated learning, the model is broadcast from a central server to wireless devices. Each device trains the model using its local data and then transfers model updates…

Microsoft’s privileged entry into OpenAI’s technology circle is being downgraded significantly. It’s neither a divorce nor a full separation. More like, the tech industry’s most valuable artificial intelligence partnership is now simply going steady with other clouds.In the tech sector, that is a huge deal. For years Microsoft’s initial investment in OpenAI has helped to make Azure one of the cornerstones of the artificial intelligence boom. Now it may have to let some of its customers visit other roads.Microsoft will not be booted from the partnership altogether. Far from it. OpenAI’s press release describing a new chapter for the partnership…

Due to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it is estimated that data centers will consume up to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Improving data center energy efficiency is one way scientists are striving to make AI more sustainable.Toward that goal, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a rapid prediction tool that tells data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip.Their method produces reliable power estimates in a few seconds, unlike traditional…