Author: Ms. R.

Teaching a robot new skills used to require coding expertise. But a new generation of robots could potentially learn from just about anyone. Engineers are designing robotic helpers that can “learn from demonstration.” This more natural training strategy enables a person to lead a robot through a task, typically in one of three ways: via remote control, such as operating a joystick to remotely maneuver a robot; by physically moving the robot through the motions; or by performing the……

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Imagine a future where artificial intelligence quietly shoulders the drudgery of software development: refactoring tangled code, migrating legacy systems, and hunting down race conditions, so that human engineers can devote themselves to architecture, design, and the genuinely novel problems still beyond a machine’s reach. Recent advances appear to have nudged that future tantalizingly close, but a new paper by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and several collaborating institutions argues that this potential future reality……

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MIT equips students with the tools to advance science and engineering — but a new class aims to ensure they also develop their own values and learn how to navigate conflicting viewpoints. Offered as a pilot this past spring, the multidisciplinary class 21.01 (Compass Course: Love, Death, and Taxes: How to Think — and Talk to Others — About Being Human), invites students to wrestle with difficult questions like: What do we value (and why)? What do we know……

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MIT researchers have developed a new theoretical framework for studying the mechanisms of treatment interactions. Their approach allows scientists to efficiently estimate how combinations of treatments will affect a group of units, such as cells, enabling a researcher to perform fewer costly experiments while gathering more accurate data. As an example, to study how interconnected genes affect cancer cell growth, a biologist might need to use a combination of treatments to target multiple genes at once. But because there……

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Scientists have long known that the brain’s visual system isn’t fully hardwired from the start — it becomes refined by what babies see — but the authors of a new MIT study still weren’t prepared for the degree of rewiring they observed when they took a first-ever look at the process in mice as it happened in real-time. As the researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory tracked hundreds of “spine” structures housing individual network connections, or……

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Daniel Kleppner, the Lester Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Physics at MIT whose work in experimental atomic physics made an immense mark on the field, died on June 16 at the age of 92, in Palo Alto, California. Kleppner’s varied research examined the interactions of atoms with static electric and magnetic fields and radiation. His work included creating precision measurements with hydrogen masers, including the co-invention of the hydrogen maser atomic clock; his research into the physics of Rydberg atoms and cavity quantum electrodynamics;……

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