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.

Sara Beery, Marzyeh Ghassemi, and Yoon Kim, EECS faculty and CSAIL principal investigators, were awarded AI2050 Early Career Fellowships earlier this week for their pursuit of “bold and ambitious work on hard problems in AI.” They received this honor from Schmidt Futures, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative that aims to accelerate scientific innovation.

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.

Ever been asked a question you only knew part of the answer to? To give a more informed response, your best move would be to phone a friend with more knowledge on the subject.

Computer graphics and geometry processing research provide the tools needed to simulate physical phenomena like fire and flames, aiding the creation of visual effects in video games and movies as well as the fabrication of complex geometric shapes using tools like 3D printing.

As artificial intelligence agents become more advanced, it could become increasingly difficult to distinguish between AI-powered users and real humans on the internet. In a new white paper, researchers from MIT, OpenAI, Microsoft, and other tech companies and academic institutions propose the use of personhood credentials, a verification technique that enables someone to prove they are a real human online, while preserving their privacy.

The impact of artificial intelligence will never be equitable if there’s only one company that builds and controls the models (not to mention the data that go into them). Unfortunately, today’s AI models are made up of billions of parameters that must be trained and tuned to maximize performance for each use case, putting the most powerful AI models out of reach for most people and companies.

Large language models like those that power ChatGPT have shown impressive performance on tasks like drafting legal briefs, analyzing the sentiment of customer reviews, or translating documents into different languages.

Mark Hamilton, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and affiliate of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), wants to use machines to understand how animals communicate. To do that, he set out first to create a system that can learn human language “from scratch.”