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Graphic of brain composed of clock gears
MIT news article

“If used carefully, this technology could improve performance in health care and potentially reduce inequities,” says Assistant Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi. “But if we’re not actually careful, technology could worsen care.”

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MIT researchers created a technique that can automatically describe the roles of individual neurons in a neural network with natural language. In this figure, the technique was able to identify “the top boundary of horizontal objects” in photographs, which are highlighted in white.
MIT news article

Neural networks are sometimes called black boxes because, despite the fact that they can outperform humans on certain tasks, even the researchers who design them often don’t understand how or why they work so well. But if a neural network is used outside the lab, perhaps to classify medical images that could help diagnose heart conditions, knowing how the model works helps researchers predict how it will behave in practice.

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Hybrid particle discovered by MIT scientists
MIT news article

MIT physicists have detected another kind of hybrid particle in an unusual, two-dimensional magnetic material. They determined that the hybrid particle is a mashup of an electron and a phonon (a quasiparticle that is produced from a material’s vibrating atoms). When they measured the force between the electron and phonon, they found that the glue, or bond, was 10 times stronger than any other electron-phonon hybrid known to date.