AI Weekly: AI is changing the way we study the stars, grow food, and create art

Too often, technologists become wrapped up in doom-and-gloom predictions about job-stealing, prejudicial, and potentially murderous AI. Fear sells, the saying goes, and that seems doubly true when it comes to emerging tech. As my colleague Khari Johnson and I have written countless times, artificial intelligence promises to transform entire verticals for the better, from health care and education to business intelligence and cybersecurity. More excitingly, it's laying the groundwork for new industries and pursuits of which we haven't yet conceived. This week, MIT graduate student and postdoctoral fellow with Event Horizon Telescope Katie Bouman created an algorithm -- Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors, or CHIRP for short -- that combined data from eight radio telescopes from around the globe to generate the first image ever of a black hole. CHIRP -- a three-year collaborative effort among MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the MIT Haystack Observatory -- reconstructs images while accounting for variations in signal strength, such that delays caused by atmospheric noise cancel each other out.