In opening the AI and the Work of the Future Congress, MIT Professor Daniela Rus presented diverging views of how artificial intelligence will impact jobs worldwide.

By automating certain menial tasks, experts think AI is poised to improve human quality of life, boost profits, and create jobs, said Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

A new demo by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab reveals what a model trained on scenes of churches and monuments decides to leave out when it draws its own version of, say, the Pantheon in Paris, or the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. The larger study, Seeing What a GAN Cannot Generate, was presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision last week.

Recently a team led by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been exploring whether self-driving cars can be programmed to classify the social personalities of other drivers, so that they can better predict what different cars will do — and, therefore, be able to drive more safely among them.

MIT and Toyota researchers have designed a new model to help autonomous vehicles determine when it’s safe to merge into traffic at intersections with obstructed views.

An autonomous robotic system invented by researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) efficiently sniffs out the most scientifically interesting — but hard-to-find — sampling spots in vast, unexplored waters.

“For me, to be really fulfilled in my work as a scientist, I want to have some tangible impact,” she says. 

Carpenter explains that artificial intelligence, which can help compute the combinations of compounds that would be better for a particular drug, can reduce trial-and-error time and ideally quicken the process of designing new medicines.

An artificial intelligence model co-developed at MIT shows in striking detail what makes some images stick in our minds.

To improve the safety of autonomous systems, MIT CSAIL scientists have developed a system that can sense tiny changes in shadows on the ground to determine if there’s a moving object coming around the corner.  

MIT researchers have compiled a dataset that captures the detailed behavior of a robotic system physically pushing hundreds of different objects.