Latest – MIT Spectrum

President’s Letter: On a Quest for Knowledge

running the course wide angle image

Running the Course

Programming mini autonomous cars during IAP

At a workshop several weeks into the subject, teams presented the data they had gathered thus far. Photo: M. Scott Brauer

A Fresh Look at the First Year

A design subject engages students as both stakeholders and problem solvers

Ian Waitz, at computer, with students and mentors from the Designing the First Year at MIT class. Photo: M. Scott Brauer

Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz on First-Year Design, the MIT Way

“We have 50 brilliant young minds working 12 hours a week on how to improve the first year”

In the 1960s, MIT professor Marvin Minsky and his group created this arm as part of their early machine vision research, which stimulated Minsky’s famous “Society of the Mind” theory of AI. Photo: MIT Museum collections

A Vision for Human and Machine Intelligence

Advancing the science and engineering of intelligence for the benefit of society

On view through December 31, 2018, at the MIT Museum, The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal juxtaposes drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience with a collection of contemporary brain imagery, such as this one from a 3-D interactive visualization by researchers from the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the MIT Media Lab’s Synthetic Neurobiology Group.

Why the Focus on Human Intelligence?

MIT’s head of brain and cognitive sciences explains the neuroscience/AI connection

The leaders of MIT’s new Task Force on the Work of the Future, from left: David Mindell, Elisabeth Reynolds, and David Autor. Photo: Melanie Gonick.

Automation and the Future of Work

An Institute-wide task force examines how innovation is reshaping the job market

Leila Pirhaji PhD ’16 spoke at the MIT Intelligence Quest launch about her startup, ReviveMed, which uses AI technology developed at MIT to leverage data from metabolomics (the study of small molecules) to expedite drug discovery. Pirhaji created the company with support from MIT programs including delta v, iTeams, StartMIT, StartIAP, the $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and the Sandbox Innovation Fund. Photo: Gretchen Ertl.

Implications, Discoveries, Applications

A sampling of MIT research underway in the realm of human and machine intelligence

Aude Oliva (right), a principal research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dan Gutfreund (left), a principal investigator at the MIT–IBM Watson AI Laboratory and a staff member at IBM Research, are the principal investigators for the Moments in Time data set, one of the projects related to AI algorithms funded by the MIT–IBM Watson AI Laboratory. Photo: John Mottern/Feature Photo Service for IBM

An Update from the MIT-IBM Watson Lab

The Moments in Time data set teaches machines to recognize actions