Through an artificial sense of touch, a robot was taught to type on a Braille keyboard. This marks an important step towards achieving artificial intelligence with the ability of performing tactile tasks. Continue reading A Tactile Robot Learns to Type Braille
Materials engineers at MIT have developed a new, more reliable design for a “memristor,” a component of computer circuits that could revolutionize artificial intelligence, improve efficiency of learning, lower energy costs, and fundamentally change the design of computers. Continue reading Thinking with Memristors
Bioengineers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have developed a new computational algorithm to improve the function of brain-computer interfaces. This algorithm works by finding common patterns of activity over time and outperforms the existing best algorithms. Continue reading Decoding Your Brain: The Search for Stability at the Brain-Computer Interface
In order to combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, a group of scientists from MIT are using artificial intelligence to discover new and effective antibiotics. They were able to predict a powerful new antibiotic compound that is effective against many dangerous pathogens. Continue reading Artificial Intelligence – our new MVP against infections?
by Isabella Grabski figures by Nicholas Lue It’s no secret that bias is present everywhere in our society, from our educational institutions to the criminal justice system. The manifestation of this bias can be as seemingly trivial as the timing of a judge’s lunch break or, more often, as fraught as race or economic class. We tend to attribute such discrimination to our own internalized … Continue reading Fairness in Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence can now best professionals at poker, adding a random, multiplayer game to the ever-expanding list of games conquered by AI. Continue reading All bets are off: a new AI beats professional players at poker
by Jordan Harrod figures by Dan Utter In the modern era, maintaining the privacy of your personal information has become more challenging than ever. Cyberattacks and social media have resulted in the average person sharing more information than ever before, in ways that they may not be aware of. One area of data privacy that isn’t discussed often, however, is health data. In the past, … Continue reading Health Data Privacy: Updating HIPAA to match today’s technology challenges
A machine learning algorithm trained using 500,000 genetic profiles can predict the height of an individual within about one inch based solely on their genes. Such an algorithm shows great promise for accurate risk assessment of complex diseases and identifying targets for therapy. However, further validation is required to evaluate how the tool will extend to more genetically diverse populations, and standardized methods for assessing genetic variation are necessary. Continue reading A Tall Order: Using Machine Learning to Predict Height from Genetic Variation
by Aparna Nathan Hospitals are churning out medical data at an unprecedented rate. 153 billion gigabytes of health care data were produced in 2013, and we’re expected to reach 2300 billion gigabytes per year by 2020. That’s almost 9 billion MacBooks’ worth of storage each year, not even counting the hundreds of thousands of genomes sequenced each year. It’s more than a human can process … Continue reading Computational Biomedicine: How data can revolutionize the patient experience
What is the hardest thing you think scientists need to do in a lab? Organic chemistry may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but multi-step organic syntheses are easily ranked a top challenge, even among experienced chemists. Nevertheless, computer scientists surprised us again with artificial intelligence (AI) which, despite having less chemistry experience than the average high-schooler, could prescribe recipes with success. … Continue reading AI advises chemists on how to make complex molecules