Browsing: AI News & Trends

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 department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), has been focused on how to design methods that can handle second-by-second decision-making using limited computational resources. “In a sense, with a small amount of resource, you…

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 these machines so many actions across different settings. “One natural idea is to use simulation as a training ground. While there has been significant progress over the last few years in the physics engines that power robotics simulators, one of the remaining challenges has been creating…

In May 2019, the government of Baltimore, Maryland, fell into chaos. Cybercriminals had locked the city out of many of its critical files and demanded payment to decrypt them. The city refused to pay ransom. The attack incapacitated a swath of services, including real estate transactions and bill payment, and recovery costs soared into the millions.The syllabus of class 11.074/11.274 (Cybersecurity Clinic), a course in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), includes a case study on Baltimore’s situation as an example of increasingly common ransomware attacks on municipal governments and other public agencies. To counter such threats,…

With the exploding popularity of generative artificial intelligence, many open-source models are now available online for anyone to adapt for their task, such as generating product renderings in a certain artistic style. But these models also find their way into the hands of nefarious actors who may optimize them to produce illegal content, like hate speech or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This is a growing problem — the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 1.5 million reports of AI-generated CSAM in 2025, an increase from 67,000 in 2024.Engineers usually test AI for harmful capabilities by prompting the…

Most people think of the waterfront as the edge of the city. A team of MIT researchers sees it as a dynamic, Lego-like construction site.Their new system, called “FloatForm,” is a swarm of small square robotic boats that assemble themselves into larger structures on the water, break apart, and reassemble into something new, all with minimal human direction. Each robot, about the size of a dinner plate at 21 centimeters square, is a self-contained vessel with its own thrusters, sensors, and magnetic latches. Together, they hint at a future in which floating infrastructure could become more adaptive: a temporary platform after…

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 has done pioneering work on particle jets at the Large Hadron Collider and is a leader in combining AI and machine learning with fundamental particle physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of…

In today’s world, artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude can perform many functions, such as composing work emails and planning travel itineraries. These chatbots are systems built around large vision-language models (VLMs): AI trained on a massive dataset that includes books, websites, code, and images. The AI algorithms are then refined on massive amounts of human-generated feedback to follow instructions and avoid harmful or unwanted output, and use that “knowledge” to produce text or images based on input from a user. Although chatbots have clear limitations, they can be very helpful for a wide range of tasks, including in…

As advanced medical technology gets closer to hitting consumer markets, the need for guardrails on protected usage should increase. What might begin as a neural implant to aid in communication could become a device used to police one’s innermost thoughts.Intrigued by the far-reaching benefits and risks of neural implants, Rachel Sava, a PhD candidate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, explores how a life-changing medical device can become a tool for surveillance by corporations and government entities in her winning submission, “Superintelligence, Superintimate,” for the fourth annual Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize. Sava’s concept was inspired by…

Without federal support for curiosity-driven research, the innovation and talent pipeline that has helped ensure our nation’s prosperity and safety could run dry, warned President Sally Kornbluth during a Washington Post Live event. During “The Next Generation,” a panel discussion moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb at The Washington Post’s “Building America Summit,” Kornbluth and Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow joined forces for a spirited discussion on the importance of curiosity-driven research, examining how universities are preparing the next generation of scientists to lead in America’s rapidly changing technological landscape. “Many of the things we have in our everyday…

The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon. To understand the fundamentals and potential impacts of these increasingly popular tools, MIT News spoke with Phillip Isola, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who studies the intelligence AI agents possess, as well as the…