One Saturday this spring, toy-sized cars were zipping along the classroom floor of the Roxbury Innovation Center. However, no one was following them around with remote controls. Instead, each car used code to react autonomously to obstacles — code written by a classroom full of middle school students. Andrew Fishberg, a staff member in the Advanced Capabilities and Systems Group at Lincoln Laboratory, had seen how students engaged with the Rapid Autonomous Complex-Environment Competing Ackermann-steering Robot (RACECAR) during the workshop at the Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI). However, BWSI is aimed at high school seniors who already excel in science, technology, engineering, and math, and Fishberg was worried that the program was reaching students too late in their educations to have maximum impact. “It only gets harder [to learn coding] the later you get to the students,” he says. “I think the future of these things is at the middle Continue reading Lincoln Laboratory staff use race cars as a vehicle to teach coding→

Artificial intelligence is likely to play a role in whether you get your next big job interview. Research by the BBC shows that video interviews and … More details

Today’s smartphones often use artificial intelligence (AI) to help make the photos we take crisper and clearer. But what if these AI tools could be used to create entire scenes from scratch? A team from MIT and IBM has now done exactly that with “GANpaint Studio,” a system that can automatically generate realistic photographic images and edit objects inside them. In addition to helping artists and designers make quick adjustments to visuals, the researchers say the work may help computer scientists identify “fake” images. David Bau, a PhD student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), describes the project as one of the first times computer scientists have been able to actually “paint with the neurons” of a neural network — specifically, a popular type of network called a generative adversarial network (GAN). Available online as an interactive demo, GANpaint Studio allows a user to upload an image Continue reading Teaching artificial intelligence to create visuals with more common sense→