Improving understanding with language
When she was a child, MIT senior Olivia Honeycutt would spend summers on her grandparents’ farm in rural Alabama outside Birmingham. The practical and cultural differences between farm and city life became more pronounced by comparison. “Life and the way we lived it slowed down on the farm,” she says. “It was a nice change…
Beacon Biosignals is mapping the brain during sleep
The human brain remains one of the most fascinating and perplexing mysteries in medicine. Scientists still struggle to match neurological activity with brain function and detect problems early, slowing efforts to treat neurological disorders and other diseases. Beacon Biosignals is working to make sense of the brain by monitoring its activity while people sleep. The…
Making the case for curiosity-driven science
“The thing that really struck me when I came to MIT and strikes me every single day is the stuff that’s going on here is amazing. The science, the engineering… every day I hear something that makes my jaw drop,” remarked President Sally Kornbluth during a live discussion with Lizzie O’Leary of Slate’s “What Next:…
Solving the “Whac-a-mole dilemma”: A smarter way to debias AI vision models
In today’s hospitals and clinics, a dermatologist may use an artificial intelligence model for classifying skin lesions to assess if the lesion is at risk of developing into a cancer or if it is benign. But if the model is biased toward certain skin tones, it could fail to identify a high-risk patient. Perhaps one…
The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab launches to shape the future of AI and quantum computing
The following is a joint announcement by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and IBM. IBM and MIT today announced the launch of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, advancing their long-standing collaboration to shape the next era of computing. The new lab expands its scope to include quantum computing, alongside foundational artificial intelligence research, with…
Enabling privacy-preserving AI training on everyday devices
A new method developed by MIT researchers can accelerate a privacy-preserving artificial intelligence training method by about 81 percent. This advance could enable a wider array of resource-constrained edge devices, like sensors and smartwatches, to deploy more accurate AI models while keeping user data secure. The MIT researchers boosted the efficiency of a technique known…
A faster way to estimate AI power consumption
Due to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it is estimated that data centers will consume up to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Improving data center energy efficiency is one way scientists are striving to make AI more sustainable. Toward that goal, researchers from MIT and…
MIT scientists build the world’s largest collection of Olympiad-level math problems, and open it to everyone
Every year, the countries competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) arrive with a booklet of their best, most original problems. Those booklets get shared among delegations, then quietly disappear. No one had ever collected them systematically, cleaned them, and made them available, not for AI researchers testing the limits of mathematical reasoning, and not…
Teaching AI models to say “I’m not sure”
Confidence is persuasive. In artificial intelligence systems, it is often misleading. Today’s most capable reasoning models share a trait with the loudest voice in the room: They deliver every answer with the same unshakable certainty, whether they’re right or guessing. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now traced that overconfidence…
Jacob Andreas and Brett McGuire named Edgerton Award winners
MIT Associate Professor Jacob Andreas of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science [EECS] and MIT Associate Professor Brett McGuire of the Department of Chemistry have been selected as the winners of the 2026 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. Established in 1982 as a permanent tribute to Institute Professor Emeritus Harold E. Edgerton’s great and enduring…