Last month, three MIT materials scientists and their colleagues published a paper describing a new artificial-intelligence system that can pore through scientific papers and extract “recipes” for producing particular types of materials. That work was envisioned as the first step toward a system that can originate recipes for materials that have been described only theoretically. Now, in…
Groundbreaking Sensors May Be Sensitive Enough for Self-Driving Cars
Using Chip Memory More Efficiently
For decades, computer chips have increased efficiency by using “caches,” small, local memory banks that store frequently used data and cut down on time- and energy-consuming communication with off-chip memory. Today’s chips generally have three or even four different levels of cache, each of which is more capacious but slower than the last. The sizes…
Testing New Networking Protocols
The transmission control protocol, or TCP, which manages traffic on the internet, was first proposed in 1974. Some version of TCP still regulates data transfer in most major data centers, the huge warehouses of servers maintained by popular websites. That’s not because TCP is perfect or because computer scientists have had trouble coming up with…
Researchers Devise Efficient Power Converter for Internet of Things
The “internet of things” is the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock will soon have sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Those sensors will have to operate at very low powers, in order to extend battery life for months or…
New Resource for Optical Chips
The Semiconductor Industry Association has estimated that at current rates of increase, computers’ energy requirements will exceed the world’s total power output by 2040. Using light rather than electricity to move data would dramatically reduce computer chips’ energy consumption, and the past 20 years have seen remarkable progress in the development of silicon photonics, or optical devices that are made from…
Researchers Add a Splash of Human Intuition to Planning Algorithms
Every other year, the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling hosts a competition in which computer systems designed by conference participants try to find the best solution to a planning problem, such as scheduling flights or coordinating tasks for teams of autonomous satellites. On all but the most straightforward problems, however, even the best…
Optimizing Code
Compilers are programs that convert computer code written in high-level languages intelligible to humans into low-level instructions executable by machines. But there’s more than one way to implement a given computation, and modern compilers extensively analyze the code they process, trying to deduce the implementations that will maximize the efficiency of the resulting software. Code…
Taming Data
The age of big data has seen a host of new techniques for analyzing large data sets. But before any of those techniques can be applied, the target data has to be aggregated, organized, and cleaned up. That turns out to be a shockingly time-consuming task. In a 2016 survey, 80 data scientists told the company CrowdFlower that, on average, they spent…
Making Big Data Manageable
One way to handle big data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful analyses on it that would be prohibitively time consuming on the full set. The methods for creating such “coresets” vary according…
Toward X-Ray Movies
Ultrashort bursts of electrons have several important applications in scientific imaging, but producing them has typically required a costly, power-hungry apparatus about the size of a car. In the journal Optica, researchers at MIT, the German Synchrotron, and the University of Hamburg in Germany describe a new technique for generating electron bursts, which could be the…
Entanglement Bonanza
Quantum computers promise huge speedups on some computational problems because they harness a strange physical property called entanglement, in which the physical state of one tiny particle depends on measurements made of another. In quantum computers, entanglement is a computational resource, roughly like a chip’s clock cycles — kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz — and memory in…
AI System Surfs Web to Improve its Performance
Of the vast wealth of information unlocked by the Internet, most is plain text. The data necessary to answer myriad questions — about, say, the correlations between the industrial use of certain chemicals and incidents of disease, or between patterns of news coverage and voter-poll results — may all be online. But extracting it from…
Faster Programs, Easier Programming
Making Computers Explain Themselves
In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognize certain objects in digital images or to infer the topics of texts. But neural nets are black…
Automating Big Data Analysis
Last year, MIT researchers presented a system that automated a crucial step in big-data analysis: the selection of a “feature set,” or aspects of the data that are useful for making predictions. The researchers entered the system in several data science contests, where it outperformed most of the human competitors and took only hours instead…
Cache Management Improved Once Again
A year ago, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory unveiled a fundamentally new way of managing memory on computer chips, one that would use circuit space much more efficiently as chips continue to comprise more and more cores, or processing units. In chips with hundreds of cores, the researchers’ scheme could free up somewhere…
Algorithm Could Enable Visible-Light-Based Imaging for Medical Devices, Autonomous Vehicles
MIT researchers have developed a technique for recovering visual information from light that has scattered because of interactions with the environment — such as passing through human tissue. The technique could lead to medical-imaging systems that use visible light, which carries much more information than X-rays or ultrasound waves, or to computer vision systems that…
Faster Parallel Computing
In today’s computer chips, memory management is based on what computer scientists call the principle of locality: If a program needs a chunk of data stored at some memory location, it probably needs the neighboring chunks as well. But that assumption breaks down in the age of big data, now that computer programs more frequently…
Programmable Network Routers
Like all data networks, the networks that connect servers in giant server farms, or servers and workstations in large organizations, are prone to congestion. When network traffic is heavy, packets of data can get backed up at network routers or dropped altogether. Also like all data networks, big private networks have control algorithms for managing…
How to Stay Anonymous Online
Anonymity networks protect people living under repressive regimes from surveillance of their Internet use. But the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in the most popular of these networks — Tor — has prompted computer scientists to try to come up with more secure anonymity schemes. At the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science…
Merging Solids, Liquids Boosts Their Optical Properties
By immersing glass particles in a fluid, researchers at MIT’s Media Lab and Harvard University are exploring a new mechanism for modifying an optical device’s diffusivity, or the extent to which it scatters light. In its current form, the new diffuser could be used to calibrate a wide range of imaging systems, but the researchers…