A.I./Robotics

Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office If you follow autonomous drone racing, you likely remember the crashes as much as the wins. In drone racing, teams compete to see which vehicle is better trained to fly fastest through an obstacle course. But the faster drones fly, the more unstable they become, and at high…

Dotmatics, a scientific informatics software and services company, announces it has been selected by Croda International to implement its Research and Development (R&D) digital program. Croda creates, makes and sells specialty chemicals that are used by industries and consumers. This new project will deepen Croda’s ability to innovate collaboratively, both internally and externally, delivering enhanced…

Southwest Research Institute received an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract valued at up to $34 million over five years to support the US. Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center through research and development of autonomous and robotic vehicles. “SwRI is proud to continue developing the latest autonomous and robotic systems for the U.S. military,” said…

Accurate predictive simulations of the electrochemical reactions that power solar fuel generators, fuel cells and batteries could advance these technologies through improved material design, and by preventing detrimental electrochemical processes, such as corrosion. However, electrochemical reactions are so complex that current computational tools can only model a fraction of all relevant factors at one time…

SRI International (SRI) has entered a research collaboration with Sanofi, leveraging SRI’s SynFini artificial intelligence (AI)-guided, automated synthetic-chemistry system platform. The collaboration will discover and develop lead candidates in multiple high-profile drug-discovery programs at Sanofi. SRI’s SynFini platform combines AI and automation to accelerate small molecule drug discovery and development, and thereby bring new drugs…

By Dave Bukey The future of clean energy is hot. Temperatures hit 800° C in parts of solar energy plants and advanced nuclear reactors. Finding materials that can stand that type of heat is tough. So experts look to Mark Messner for answers. A principal mechanical engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne…

Nagoya Institute of Technology (NITech) and NGK INSULATORS (NGK), both based in Nagoya, Japan, have established the NGK Environment Innovation Laboratory on the NITech campus. This collaboration between the private sector and academia will work on creating innovative next-generation products that contribute to a significant reduction of greenhouse gases, such as materials for next-generation power…

Eighteen months after creating the world’s first cell cultured human milk, 108Labs is now focused on accelerating the field from lab to factory by building and programming the world’s first autonomous Cellufacturing facility and artificial intelligence platform for production of cell cultured human milk in the birthplace of biosynthetic human milk, Hillsborough, N.C. With an…

From ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Small pieces of plastic are everywhere, stretching from urban environments to pristine wilderness. Left to their own devices, it can take hundreds of years for them to degrade completely. Catalysts activated by sunlight could speed up the process but getting these compounds to interact with microplastics is difficult. In…

By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office Over the years, robots have gotten quite good at identifying objects — as long as they’re out in the open. Discerning buried items in granular material like sand is a taller order. To do that, a robot would need fingers that were slender enough to penetrate the sand,…

By Coury Turczyn The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has licensed its award-winning artificial intelligence software system, the Multinode Evolutionary Neural Networks for Deep Learning, to General Motors for use in vehicle technology and design. The AI system, known as MENNDL, uses evolution to design optimal convolutional neural networks – algorithms used by…

SciBite, an Elsevier company, has announced the launch of SciBiteSearch. The next-generation scientific search and analytics platform offers powerful interrogation and analysis capabilities across unstructured and structured data, from public and proprietary sources. Researchers today face increasing challenges around accessing and deriving meaningful insights from the ever-larger volumes of data, presented in an array of formats…

By John Toon, Georgia Institute of Technology Many parcel delivery drones of the future are expected to handle packages weighing five pounds or less, a restriction that would allow small, standardized UAVs to handle a large percentage of the deliveries now done by ground vehicles. But will that relegate heavier packages to slower delivery by…

The Pistoia Alliance, a global, not-for-profit alliance that works to lower barriers to innovation in life science and healthcare R&D, has this week announced the results of a survey of life science professionals, on the implementation of AI and blockchain in the life sciences industry. The survey shows there is a high level of interest…

When computers display the type of intelligence that humans and animals possess, this is known as artificial intelligence (AI). Intelligence involves perceiving the environment and using this information to take actions that maximize the likelihood of achieving objectives. Specific AI capabilities include learning, perception, reasoning, planning, knowledge representation and natural language processing. Ultimately, it is…

A form of machine learning that excels at pattern recognition Deep learning is a form of artificial neural network used for machine learning. This is a way of storing and processing information that is very different to conventional computers. Deep learning allows a computer to learn a task without a human first defining the algorithm,…

By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles and…

ScienceLogic, a provider of AI-driven monitoring solutions for hybrid cloud management, announced today that it has raised $105 million in growth financing. Silver Lake Waterman  led the company’s Series E round with participation from existing investors Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and NewView Capital. The investment will support the company’s continued innovation in the AIOps market…

Written by Daniel Ackerman, MIT News Office When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, doctors and researchers rushed to find effective treatments. There was little time to spare. “Making new drugs takes forever,” says Caroline Uhler, a computational biologist in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems…

“Transforming R&D: Digital innovation in the pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries,” a new report by MIT Technology Review Insights, explores how leading pharmaceuticals and chemicals companies are using artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other digital technologies to transform scientific research and enhance R&D performance. The report, produced in association with PerkinElmer Informatics, is based on in-depth interviews…

Written by Daniel Ackerman, MIT News Office Contemporary robots can move quickly. “The motors are fast, and they’re powerful,” says Sabrina Neuman. Yet in complex situations, like interactions with people, robots often don’t move quickly. “The hang up is what’s going on in the robot’s head,” she adds. Perceiving stimuli and calculating a response takes…

Accelerating Scale-up with AI Thursday, January 28, 2021 • 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. CT Rapid advances in energy technologies have been enabled in part by innovative, high-performance materials. To keep the U.S. competitive in energy materials manufacturing, there is an intensifying need to bring new materials out of the laboratory and into commercial production faster…

A new microscope from researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center can rapidly image large tissue sections, potentially during surgery, to discover on the spot if the cancer was successfully removed. It was created by engineers and applied physicists at Rice and is described in a study recently published…