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The system uses three agents to piece together the objects, walls, and overall look of a 3D scene. Its realistic recreations of indoor spaces help robots practice skills and try out different ways of doing tasks before they’re powered on (Credit: Tim Malieckal/MIT CSAIL using assets from the researchers).
CSAIL article

An increasingly common sight: robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers. But these machines aren’t yet the do-it-all assistants you’d want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it’s labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach these machines so many actions across different settings. 

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Caption:An MIT team proved that it is impossible to get information about correlations from two-way comparisons alone. Correlations can be discerned, however, when large numbers of people rate three alternatives in their order of preference (Credits: iStock).
CSAIL article

In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to them, even though they cannot assign a particular number to that choice.

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CSAIL article

Imagine working at a warehouse or office sometime in the near future, and you’re asked to help a new trainee learn the basics of their job. The catch: It’s a robot. To teach them, you might want to play a game of “show and tell” — that is, physically showing how to do something a few different ways, while also explaining what you’re doing.

CSAIL article

There’s a delicate art to teaching robots, even when you’re preparing them for predictable environments like factories, where they’ll repeat the same tasks a little differently depending on the obstacles they face. Whether a human is suddenly in their way or there’s new clutter, the machine must closely mimic its operator’s actions by staying on a trajectory (or motion path).

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"It's like a microscope," says Joseph Ravichandran, the MIT PhD student who led the project. "If you've got a hand magnifying glass, you can see a little bit. But if you had an electron microscope, now we're really talking. That's what Fractal is. The electron microscope of operating systems” (Credit: Gabriel Maragaño).
CSAIL article

When security researchers want to understand what a modern processor is really doing with the kind of detail that determines whether attacks like Spectre and Meltdown are possible, they usually run their experiments on top of an operating system that was never built for the job. They open up macOS or Linux, patch the kernel by hand, and hope the modifications hold. The approach is unstable, hard to reproduce, and on Apple's platforms, slated for deprecation.