Daniela Rus, a distinguished computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been honored with induction into the prestigious Académie Nationale de Médecine (ANM) as a foreign member on January 7, 2025. As the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Daniela leads over 1,700 researchers in pioneering innovations to advance computing and improve global well-being.
By adapting artificial intelligence models known as large language models, researchers have made great progress in their ability to predict a protein’s structure from its sequence. However, this approach hasn’t been as successful for antibodies, in part because of the hypervariability seen in this type of protein.
Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.
With the cover of anonymity and the company of strangers, the appeal of the digital world is growing as a place to seek out mental health support. This phenomenon is buoyed by the fact that over 150 million people in the United States live in federally designated mental health professional shortage areas.
