Natalie Lao was set on becoming an electrical engineer, like her parents, until she stumbled on course 6.S192 (Making Mobile Apps), taught by Professor Hal Abelson. Here was a blueprint for turning a smartphone into a tool for finding clean drinking water, or sorting pictures of faces, or doing just about anything. “I thought, I wish people knew building tech could be like this,” she said on a recent afternoon, taking a break from writing her dissertation. After shifting her focus as an MIT undergraduate to computer science, Lao joined Abelson’s lab, which was busy spreading its App Inventor platform and do-it-yourself philosophy to high school students around the world. App Inventor set Lao on her path to making it easy for anyone, from farmers to factory workers, to understand AI, and use it to improve their lives. Now in the third and final year of her PhD at MIT, Lao is also the Continue reading Demystifying artificial intelligence→

Researchers in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) have received a gift to advance their work on a device designed to position living cells for growing human organs using acoustic waves. The Acoustofluidic Device Design with Deep Learning is being supported by Natick, Massachusetts-based MathWorks, a leading developer of mathematical computing software. “One of the fundamental problems in growing cells is how to move and position them without damage,” says John R. Williams, a professor in CEE. “The devices we’ve designed are like acoustic tweezers.” Inspired by the complex and beautiful patterns in the sand made by waves, the researchers’ approach is to use sound waves controlled by machine learning to design complex cell patterns. The pressure waves generated by acoustics in a fluid gently move and position the cells without damaging them. The engineers developed a computer simulator to create a variety of device designs, which Continue reading Gift will allow MIT researchers to use artificial intelligence in a biomedical device→

A viral TikTok video hints at what culture could look like under the sway of mysterious, A.I.-powered algorithms. More details

At a facility near Berlin, a new kind of robot is automating tasks that until recently had been out of the reach of machines. More details

Travel providers now use software to re-price their offerings, sometimes dozens of times a day, putting travelers at a big disadvantage. More details

What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come? More details

With their translucent bells, moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) move around the oceans in a very efficient way. Scientists have now used a mathematical model to investigate how these cnidarians manage to use their neural networks to control their locomotion even when they are injured. The results may also contribute to the optimization of underwater robots. More details

Nearly everyone responds to music with movement, whether through subtle toe-tapping or an all-out boogie. A recent discovery shows that our dance style is almost always the same, regardless of the type of music, and a computer can identify the dancer with astounding accuracy. More details

The chess world was amazed when the computer algorithm AlphaZero learned, after just four hours on its own, to beat the best chess programs built on human expertise. Now a research group has used the very same algorithm to control a quantum computer. More details

Scientists repurposed living frog cells — and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These tiny ‘xenobots’ can move toward a target and heal themselves after being cut. These novel living machines are neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. They’re a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism. More details