Author: Ms. R.

Turns out, even language models “think” they’re biased. When prompted in ChatGPT, the response was as follows: “Yes, language models can have biases, because the training data reflects the biases present in society from which that data was collected. For example, gender and racial biases are prevalent in many real-world datasets, and if a language model is trained on that, it can perpetuate and amplify these biases in its predictions.” A well-known but dangerous problem.  Humans (typically) can dabble……

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In a packed room in MIT’s Stata Center, hundreds of digital robots collide across a giant screen projected at the front of the room. A crowd of students in the audience gasps and cheers as the battle’s outcome hangs in the balance. In an upper corner of the screen, the people who have programmed the robot armies’ strategies narrate the action in real time. This isn’t the latest e-sports event, it’s MIT’s long-running Battlecode competition. Open to student teams……

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How would we design and build differently if we learned to live at multiple time scales? How would human communities respond to global challenges if the short-term mindset of contemporary life was expanded to encompass new dimensions of past and future — diving into the depths of geological history and projecting forward to imagine the consequences of our actions today? These are questions that Cristina Parreño Alonso addresses in her practice as an architect, artist, and senior lecturer in……

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For many years, the Indonesian government’s food aid program sent bags of rice to villages, where local leaders were supposed to distribute them to poor residents every month. But starting about five years ago, Indonesia changed that. Instead of rice bags, the poor were sent debit cards to buy the equivalent amount of food at local neighborhood shops. Going digital had a major effect: Suddenly millions of Indonesians in the program started receiving the total amount of food intended……

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On Sept. 26, 2022, at precisely 6:14 p.m. ET, a box-shaped spacecraft no bigger than a loveseat smashed directly into an asteroid wider than a football field. The planned impact knocked the space rock off its orbit, showing for the first time that an asteroid can potentially be deflected away from Earth.   The spacecraft was the key part of DART, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which aimed to redirect the paths of Dimorphos and Didymos — two small,……

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Modern fabrication tools such as 3D printers can make structural materials in shapes that would have been difficult or impossible using conventional tools. Meanwhile, new generative design systems can take great advantage of this flexibility to create innovative designs for parts of a new building, car, or virtually any other device. But such “black box” automated systems often fall short of producing designs that are fully optimized for their purpose, such as providing the greatest strength in proportion to……

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Stroll past MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscience and engineering, and you can peer through large panes of glass at hundreds of tool sets ready to assist researchers in their scientific journey. Anyone who wants to take a closer look at what is happening at the nanoscale and beyond — even seeing individual atoms — will be welcomed by Anna Osherov, assistant director for Characterization.nano, helping researchers navigate a complex array of capabilities to apply the power of nanotechnology……

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Science Surfaces, a capsule collection of body coverings and accessories, serve as canvases for digital prints of ideas inspired by award-winning biomedical images produced by life science research labs at MIT. The exhibition, now on display in the Koch Institute Public Galleries, is the result of the inaugural Peers + Pros Project, a Boston Fashion Week creative learning initiative catalyzed by the Cambridge Science Festival and sponsored in part by MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Fiona Shine……

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A lack of access to critical resources has prevented many middle- and low-income entrepreneurs from starting successful businesses, economic sociologist Daniel Auguste told an MIT audience in a Feb. 9 presentation on barriers to entrepreneurship in under-resourced communities of America. That’s a fundamental problem because entrepreneurship is one of society’s most significant pathways to economic security and building intergenerational wealth, according to Auguste, who is an MLK Visiting Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management for the……

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The 2023 Marconi Prize has been awarded to Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The Marconi Prize, widely considered to be the top honor within the field of communications technology, is given annually to “innovators who have made significant contributions to increasing digital inclusivity through the advancement of information and communications technology.” “Hari’s unique contributions have……

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When Liu He, a Chinese economist, politician, and “chip czar,” was tapped to lead the charge in a chipmaking arms race with the United States, his message lingered in the air, leaving behind a dewy glaze of tension: “For our country, technology is not just for growth… it is a matter of survival.” Once upon a time, the United States’ early technological prowess positioned the nation to outpace foreign rivals and cultivate a competitive advantage for domestic businesses. Yet,……

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In 2010, Phiala Shanahan was an undergraduate at the University of Adelaide, wrapping up a degree in computational physics, when she heard of an unexpected discovery in particle physics. The news had nothing to do with any of the rare, exotic particles that physicists were searching for at the time. Rather, the revelation revolved around the mundane, ubiquitous proton. That year, scientists had measured the proton’s radius and discovered that the particle was ever so slightly smaller than what……

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One of the most expensive steps in manufacturing protein drugs such as antibodies or insulin is the purification step: isolating the protein from the bioreactor used to produce it. This step can account for up to half of the total cost of manufacturing a protein. In an effort to help reduce those costs, MIT engineers have devised a new way to perform this kind of purification. Their approach, which uses specialized nanoparticles to rapidly crystallize proteins, could help to……

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