Research

Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands recently visited MIT, taking an innovation-oriented campus tour with a focus on computing and robotics.

For years, MIT Associate Professor Adam Chlipala has been toiling away behind behind-the-scenes, developing tools to help programmers more quickly and easily generate their code — and prove it does what it’s supposed to do.

An automated system developed by MIT researchers designs and 3-D prints complex robotic parts called actuators that are optimized according to an enormous number of specifications. In short, the system does automatically what is virtually impossible for humans to do by hand.

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.