For Priya Donti, childhood trips to India were more than an opportunity to visit extended family. The biennial journeys activated in her a motivation that continues to shape her research and her teaching. Contrasting her family home in Massachusetts, Donti — now the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and…
MIT engineers have developed a printable aluminum alloy that can withstand high temperatures and is five times stronger than traditionally manufactured aluminum. The new printable metal is made from a mix of aluminum and other elements that the team identified using a combination of simulations and machine learning, which significantly pruned the number of possible…
Tokamaks are machines that are meant to hold and harness the power of the sun. These fusion machines use powerful magnets to contain a plasma hotter than the sun’s core and push the plasma’s atoms to fuse and release energy. If tokamaks can operate safely and efficiently, the machines could one day provide clean and…
For patients with inflammatory bowel disease, antibiotics can be a double-edged sword. The broad-spectrum drugs often prescribed for gut flare-ups can kill helpful microbes alongside harmful ones, sometimes worsening symptoms over time. When fighting gut inflammation, you don’t always want to bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial…
The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship announced that Ana Bakshi has been named its new executive director. Bakshi stepped into the role at the start of the fall semester and will collaborate closely with the managing director, Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice Bill Aulet, to elevate the center to higher levels. “Ana is uniquely…
The new TX-Generative AI Next (TX-GAIN) computing system at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) is the most powerful AI supercomputer at any U.S. university. With its recent ranking from TOP500, which biannually publishes a list of the top supercomputers in various categories, TX-GAIN joins the ranks of other powerful systems at the LLSC, all supporting…
In part 2 of our two-part series on generative artificial intelligence’s environmental impacts, MIT News explores some of the ways experts are working to reduce the technology’s carbon footprint. The energy demands of generative AI are expected to continue increasing dramatically over the next decade. For instance, an April 2025 report from the International Energy Agency predicts…
Machine-learning models can speed up the discovery of new materials by making predictions and suggesting experiments. But most models today only consider a few specific types of data or variables. Compare that with human scientists, who work in a collaborative environment and consider experimental results, the broader scientific literature, imaging and structural analysis, personal experience…
Annotating regions of interest in medical images, a process known as segmentation, is often one of the first steps clinical researchers take when running a new study involving biomedical images. For instance, to determine how the size of the brain’s hippocampus changes as patients age, the scientist first outlines each hippocampus in a series of…
Whitney Zhang ’21 believes in the importance of valuing workers regardless of where they fit into an organizational chart. Zhang is a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Economics studying labor economics. She explores how the technological and managerial decisions companies make affect workers across the pay spectrum. “I’ve been interested in economics, economic impacts, and…