Ready for that long-awaited summer vacation? First, you’ll need to pack all items required for your trip into a suitcase, making sure everything fits securely without crushing anything fragile.
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.
Diffusion models like OpenAI’s DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn’t considered before.
A human clearing junk out of an attic can often guess the contents of a box simply by picking it up and giving it a shake, without the need to see what’s inside. Researchers from MIT, Amazon Robotics, and the University of British Columbia have taught robots to do something similar.
When the Venice Biennale’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition launches on May 10, its guiding theme will be applying nimble, flexible intelligence to a demanding world — an ongoing focus of its curator, MIT faculty member Carlo Ratti.
Fish are masters of coordinated motion. Schools of fish have no leader, yet individuals manage to stay in formation, avoid collisions, and respond with liquid flexibility to changes in their environment. Reproducing this combination of robustness and flexibility has been a long-standing challenge for human engineered systems like robots. Now, using virtual reality for freely-moving fish, a research team based in Konstanz has taken an important step towards that goal.
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.
