Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs)

At CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus Bob Metcalfe '69 showcased how the many individual bits of innovation that emerged from the Telnet Protocol later become the foundation for email, writes Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, for Forbes. “Looking ahead to the future of connectivity, Metcalfe spoke of the challenges of limited network bandwidth, and the importance of keeping connectivity firmly in mind when developing any new computing technologies,” writes Rus.

MIT researchers at MIT have developed a microfluidic chip-based model of liver tissue that “allows researchers to understand the biological mechanisms underlying liver tissue regeneration and points to several molecules that may promote the process,” reports William A. Haseltine for Forbes. "These results mark significant progress in our understanding of the human body’s regenerative properties," writes Haseltine. 

At CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, Prof. Stefanie Jegelka’s presentation provided insight into “the failures and successes of neural networks and explored some crucial context that can help engineers and other human observers to focus in on how learning is happening,” reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes.

Prof. Jacob Andreas explored the concept of language guided program synthesis at CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes. “Language is a tool,” said Andreas during his talk. “Not just for training models, but actually interpreting them and sometimes improving them directly, again, in domains, not just involving languages (or) inputs, but also these kinds of visual domains as well.”

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, writes for Forbes about Prof. Dina Katabi’s work using insights from wireless systems to help glean information about patient health. “Incorporating continuous time data collection in healthcare using ambient WiFi detectable by machine learning promises an era where early and accurate diagnosis becomes the norm rather than the exception,” writes Rus.

Researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed “Sybil,” an AI tool that can detect the risk of a patient developing lung cancer within six years, reports Mary Kekatos for ABC News. “Sybil was trained on low-dose chest computer tomography scans, which is recommended for those between ages 50 and 80 who either have a significant history of smoking or currently smoke,” explains Kekatos.

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, emphasizes the central role universities play in fostering innovation and the importance of ensuring universities have the computing resources necessary to help tackle major global challenges. Rus writes, “academia needs a large-scale research cloud that allows researchers to efficiently share resources” to address hot-button issues like generative AI. “It would provide an integrated platform for large-scale data management, encourage collaborative studies across research organizations, and offer access to cutting-edge technologies, while ensuring cost efficiency,” Rus explains.

Writing for Forbes, research affiliate John Werner spotlights Prof. Stefanie Mueller’s presentation at the CSAIL Imagination in Action event on her work developing a new type of paint that allows users to change the color and pattern of different objects. “The long-term vision here, really, is to give those physical objects the same capabilities as we have in digital,” said Mueller. “I hope in the future we will all get some free stuff, and we would just have an [app] where we can download different textures we can apply, and change our outfits.”

During her talk at CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, explored the promise of using liquid neural networks “to solve some of AI’s notorious complexity problems,” writes research affiliate John Werner for Forbes. “Liquid networks are a new model for machine learning,” said Rus. “They're compact, interpretable and causal. And they have shown great promise in generalization under heavy distribution shifts.”

In an article for Forbes, research affiliate John Werner spotlights Prof. Dina Katabi and her work showcasing how AI can boost the capabilities of clinical data. “We are going to collect data, clinical data from patients continuously in their homes, track the symptoms, the evolution of those symptoms, and process this data with machine learning so that we can get insights before problems occur,” says Katabi.

Forbes reporter Stuart Anderson spotlights a number of international students who became founders of top U.S. AI companies, including MIT alumni Sébastien Boyer MS '16 and Aditya Khosla PhD '16. Boyer co-founded “FarmWise, which employs AI for precision weeding on farms,” and Khosla co-founded PathAI, a biotech startup that uses AI to “optimize the analysis of patient tissue samples and for other clinical and diagnostic purposes,” writes Anderson.

Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Nicole Estephan of WCVB-TV’s Chronicle about her work developing new AI systems that could be used to help diagnose breast and lung cancer before the cancers are detectable to the human eye.

Writing for Forbes, Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, makes the case that liquid neural networks “offer an elegant and efficient computational framework for training and inference in machine learning. With their compactness, adaptability, and streamlined computation, these networks have the potential to reshape the landscape of artificial intelligence and drive further breakthroughs in the field.”

MIT has been selected as the world’s best university in the 2024 QS World University Rankings, reports Cecilia Rodriguez for Forbes. MIT has secured “the top position for the 12^th consecutive year,” writes Rodriguez.

Former MIT Prof. Edward Fredkin, “a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a maverick theorist,” has died at 88, reports Alex Williams for The New York Times. Williams notes that Fredkin, who worked on Project MAC during his time at MIT, was “fueled by a seemingly limitless scientific imagination and a blithe indifference to conventional thinking.” Prof. Gerald Sussman recalls that “Ed Fredkin had more ideas per day than most people have in a month.”