Animators could create more realistic bouncy, stretchy, and squishy characters for movies and video games thanks to a new simulation method developed by researchers at MIT.
The Hertz Foundation announced that it has awarded fellowships to eight MIT affiliates. The prestigious award provides each recipient with five years of doctoral-level research funding (up to a total of $250,000), which gives them an unusual measure of independence in their graduate work to pursue groundbreaking research.
When you’re trying to communicate or understand ideas, words don’t always do the trick. Sometimes the more efficient approach is to do a simple sketch of that concept — for example, diagramming a circuit might help make sense of how the system works.
But what if artificial intelligence could help us explore these visualizations? While these systems are typically proficient at creating realistic paintings and cartoonish drawings, many models fail to capture the essence of sketching: its stroke-by-stroke, iterative process, which helps humans brainstorm and edit how they want to represent their ideas.
The ocean is teeming with life. But unless you get up close, much of the marine world can easily remain unseen. That’s because water itself can act as an effective cloak: Light that shines through the ocean can bend, scatter, and quickly fade as it travels through the dense medium of water and reflects off the persistent haze of ocean particles. This makes it extremely challenging to capture the true color of objects in the ocean without imaging them at close range.
What would a behind-the-scenes look at a video generated by an artificial intelligence model be like? You might think the process is similar to stop-motion animation, where many images are created and stitched together, but that’s not quite the case for “diffusion models” like OpenAl's SORA and Google's VEO 2.
The ambiguity in medical imaging can present major challenges for clinicians who are trying to identify disease. For instance, in a chest X-ray, pleural effusion, an abnormal buildup of fluid in the lungs, can look very much like pulmonary infiltrates, which are accumulations of pus or blood.
An estimated 20% of every dollar spent on manufacturing is wasted, totaling up to $8 trillion a year, more than the entire annual budget for the U.S. federal government. While industries like healthcare and finance have been rapidly transformed by digital technologies, manufacturing has relied on traditional processes that lead to costly errors, product delays, and an inefficient use of engineers’ time.
Essential for many industries ranging from Hollywood computer-generated imagery to product design, 3D modeling tools often use text or image prompts to dictate different aspects of visual appearance, like color and form. As much as this makes sense as a first point of contact, these systems are still limited in their realism due to their neglect of something central to the human experience: touch.
When visual information enters the brain, it travels through two pathways that process different aspects of the input. For decades, scientists have hypothesized that one of these pathways, the ventral visual stream, is responsible for recognizing objects, and that it might have been optimized by evolution to do just that.
The process of discovering molecules that have the properties needed to create new medicines and materials is cumbersome and expensive, consuming vast computational resources and months of human labor to narrow down the enormous space of potential candidates.
