Author: Ms. R.

In our current age of artificial intelligence, computers can generate their own “art” by way of diffusion models, iteratively adding structure to a noisy initial state until a clear image or video emerges. Diffusion models have suddenly grabbed a seat at everyone’s table: Enter a few words and experience instantaneous, dopamine-spiking dreamscapes at the intersection of reality and fantasy. Behind the scenes, it involves a complex, time-intensive process requiring numerous iterations for the algorithm to perfect the image. MIT……

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In 2010, when Ericmoore Jossou was attending college in northern Nigeria, the lights would flicker in and out all day, sometimes lasting only for a couple of hours at a time. The frustrating experience reaffirmed Jossou’s realization that the country’s sporadic energy supply was a problem. It was the beginning of his path toward nuclear engineering. Because of the energy crisis, “I told myself I was going to find myself in a career that allows me to develop energy technologies that……

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MIT has a rich history of productive collaboration between the arts and the sciences, anchored by the conviction that these two conventionally opposed ways of thinking can form a deeply generative symbiosis that serves to advance and humanize new technologies.  This ethos was made tangible when the Bauhaus artist and educator György Kepes established the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) within the Department of Architecture in 1967. CAVS has since evolved into the Art, Culture, and Technology……

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Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, members of the MIT faculty knew that violence and political pressures in the region endangered the work and well-being of Ukrainian scholars and contemplated how MIT could assist. The start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 was the decisive catalyst — triggering the launch of the MIT-Ukraine Program later that year and eventually spurring creation of the new Global MIT At-Risk Fellows (GMAF) program with an initial focus on……

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In late February, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian A. Waitz and Faculty Chair Mary Fuller announced the formation and launch of the Task Force on the MIT Undergraduate Academic Program (TFUAP). The effort fulfills a critical recommendation of the Task Force 2021 and Beyond RIC1 (Undergraduate Program) and draws upon several, prior foundational working groups — some focused on the current General Institute Requirements (GIRs) and others on updating recent studies for the purposes of this……

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Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by ticks, affects nearly half a million people in the United States every year. In most cases, antibiotics effectively clear the infection, but for some patients, symptoms linger for months or years. Researchers at MIT and the University of Helsinki have now discovered that human sweat contains a protein that can protect against Lyme disease. They also found that about one-third of the population carries a genetic variant of this protein that is……

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Imagine yourself glancing at a busy street for a few moments, then trying to sketch the scene you saw from memory. Most people could draw the rough positions of the major objects like cars, people, and crosswalks, but almost no one can draw every detail with pixel-perfect accuracy. The same is true for most modern computer vision algorithms: They are fantastic at capturing high-level details of a scene, but they lose fine-grained details as they process information. Now, MIT……

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