Ryan Eustice’s interest in self-driving cars began 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic. As a PhD student in the joint MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Program, Eustice focused on creating technologies for underwater vehicles to map and understand their environments. “That’s how I got into this line of work originally,” explains Eustice, who is currently senior vice president of automated driving at Toyota Research Institute and associate professor at the University of Michigan. “From an engineering perspective, the focus would be on helping the robot better navigate and understand its surroundings.” At MIT and Woods Hole, Eustice would deploy robots on field cruises to take pictures or make a map of the seafloor using cameras, sonar, or LIDAR — an acronym for light detection and ranging. That map would then be used by a geologist or marine biologist for their research purposes. A breakthrough in his career came in Continue reading On a mission to build the uncrashable car→

Antonio Torralba has been named the inaugural director of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, effective immediately, Provost Martin Schmidt announced today in an email to the MIT community. Launched on February 1 of this year, The Quest is a campus-wide initiative to discover the foundations of intelligence and to drive the development of technological tools that can positively influence virtually every aspect of society. “The range of questions we aspire to explore through The Quest is simply breathtaking,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “There are moments in the history of science when the tools, the data, and the big questions are perfectly synchronized to achieve major advances. I believe we are in just such a moment, and that we are poised to advance the understanding of intelligence in every sense in a profound way. Antonio is exactly the leader we need to move this effort forward.” An expert in Continue reading MIT announces leadership of its Quest for Intelligence→