Regina Barzilay, School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health at MIT, CSAIL Principal Investigator, and Jameel Clinic AI Faculty Lead, has been awarded the 2025 Frances E. Allen Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Barzilay’s award recognizes the impact of her machine-learning algorithms on medicine and natural language processing.

Many companies are turning to automation—a solution long feared by some workers—in an effort to thrive in this economic environment.

Whether you’re describing the sound of your faulty car engine or meowing like your neighbor’s cat, imitating sounds with your voice can be a helpful way to relay a concept when words don’t do the trick.

Daniela Rus, Director of CSAIL and MIT EECS Professor, was recently named a co-recipient of the 2024 John Scott Award by the Board of Directors of City Trusts. This prestigious honor, steeped in historical significance, celebrates scientific innovation at the very location where American independence was signed in Philadelphia, a testament to the enduring connection between scientific progress and human potential.

As far as user data is concerned, much is made of the big social media conglomerates like Google and Meta. However, cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the backbone of countless applications, holding the keys to vast amounts of data stored on their servers.

Generative AI systems like large language models rely heavily on deep learning - and, in particular, transformers. Transformers make use of an “attention mechanism” for modeling interactions among inputs, which essentially involves doing nonlinear pairwise comparison between inputs and assigning different weights to tokens in a sequence, enabling a prioritization of some over others. The empirical effectiveness of this attention mechanism has led some in the community to claim that attention is “all you need” (the title of the original 2017 Google paper that introduced transformers).

The Irish philosopher George Berkely, best known for his theory of immaterialism, once famously mused, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”