One way to counteract the damping and the noise is to apply stabilizing pulses of light or voltage of fluctuating intensity to the quantum system. Now researchers from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan have shown that they can use artificial intelligence to discover these pulses in an optimized way to appropriately cool a micro-mechanical object to its quantum state and control its motion. Their research was published in November, 2022, in Physical Review Research as a Letter. Micro-mechanical objects, which are large compared to an atom or electron, behave classically when kept at a high temperature, or even at room temperature. However, if such mechanical modes can be cooled down to their lowest energy state, which physicists call the ground state, quantum behaviour could be realised in such systems.

One way to counteract the damping and the noise is to apply stabilizing pulses of light or voltage of fluctuating intensity to the quantum system. Now researchers from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan have shown that they can use artificial intelligence to discover these pulses in an optimized way to appropriately cool a micro-mechanical object to its quantum state and control its motion. Their research was published in November, 2022, in Physical Review Research as a Letter. Micro-mechanical objects, which are large compared to an atom or electron, behave classically when kept at a high temperature, or even at room temperature. However, if such mechanical modes can be cooled down to their lowest energy state, which physicists call the ground state, quantum behaviour could be realised in such systems.

A new cross-disciplinary research initiative at MIT aims to promote the understanding and use of AI across all segments of society. The effort, called Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE), will develop new teaching approaches and tools to engage learners in settings from preK-12 to the workforce. "People are using AI every day in our workplaces and our private lives. Being digitally literate is no longer enough. People need to be AI-literate to understand the responsible use of AI and create things with it at individual, community, and societal levels," says RAISE Director Cynthia Breazeal, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. "But right now, if you want to learn about AI to make AI-powered applications, you pretty much need to have a college degree in computer science or related topic," Breazeal adds.

In the age of blockchains, 3D printing, CRISPR-Cas9 -- and the inevitable new technologies that are yet to emerge -- today's workforce is struggling to keep up with the latest developments. For large companies and executives, finding resources for workers to learn from that are current, reputable, and unbiased can be challenging. To address this unmet need, MIT has assembled a team of writers, educators, and subject matter experts from both academia and industry to power the Institute's newest online learning offering -- a digital content library designed to help organizations keep their workforces apprised of the latest developments in technology and science. Known as MIT Horizon, the platform contains bite-sized articles, videos, and podcasts on emerging technologies, with early topics including additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and robotics. "Technologies are advancing very rapidly, and we feel a responsibility at MIT to provide learning opportunities that can help today's workforce keep up with this pace of innovation," says Sanjay Sarma, MIT vice president for open learning.

We propose a biologically-inspired research agenda with parallel tracks aimed at AI and AI safety. The bottom-up component consists of building a sequence of biophysically realistic simulations of simple organisms such as the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and the zebrafish Danio rerio to serve as platforms for research into AI algorithms and system architectures. The top-down component consists of an approach to value alignment that grounds AI goal structures in neuropsychology. Our belief is that parallel pursuit of these tracks will inform the development of value-aligned AI systems that have been inspired by embodied organisms with sensorimotor integration. An important set of side benefits is that the research trajectories we describe here are grounded in long-standing intellectual traditions within existing research communities and funding structures. In addition, these research programs overlap with significant contemporary themes in the biological and psychological sciences such as data/model integration and reproducibility.

Those three words demonstrated the amazing potential of artificial intelligence. It was the answer to a final question in a particularly memorable 2011 episode of Jeopardy!. The three competitors were former champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, and Watson, a super computer developed by IBM. By answering the final question correctly, Watson became the first computer to beat a human on the famous quiz show. "At the time, Watson was connected to a super computer the size of a room while the human brain is just a few pounds. But the ability to replicate a human brain's ability to learn is incredibly difficult."

Those three words demonstrated the amazing potential of artificial intelligence. It was the answer to a final question in a particularly memorable 2011 episode of Jeopardy!. The three competitors were former champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, and Watson, a super computer developed by IBM. By answering the final question correctly, Watson became the first computer to beat a human on the famous quiz show. "At the time, Watson was connected to a super computer the size of a room while the human brain is just a few pounds. But the ability to replicate a human brain's ability to learn is incredibly difficult."

IBM on Tuesday unveiled a chip that is designed for the new Artificial Intelligence-powered world that requires crunching of humongous amounts of data at high speeds to get the most accurate results. Called POWER9, it uses some of the latest technologies, resulting in two significant advantages: one, increased bandwidth, and two, ability for main processors and accelerators to work coherently and simultaneously on data. Stating that it is a one of its kind in the industry, Dipankar Sarma, distinguished engineer, Linux Technology Center, IBM Systems, said the new chip doubles the bandwidth by which one can get more data really fast. "We significantly increase the ability to process data; five to 10 times faster," he said. He spoke of two applications.

In 2007, Google unleashed a fleet of cars with roof-mounted cameras to provide street-level images of roads around the world. Now MIT spinout Essess is bringing similar "drive-by" innovations to energy efficiency in homes and businesses. The startup deploys cars with thermal-imaging rooftop rigs that create heat maps of thousands of homes and buildings per hour, detecting fixable leaks in "building envelopes" -- windows, doors, walls, and foundations -- to help owners curb energy loss. About the size of a large backpack, Essess' rig includes several long-wave infrared radiometric cameras and near-infrared cameras. These cameras capture heat signatures, while a LiDAR system captures 3-D images to discern building facades from the physical environment.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif announced today a significant expansion of the Institute's programs in learning research and online and digital education -- from pre-kindergarten through residential higher education and lifelong learning -- that fulfills a number of recommendations made in 2014 by the Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education. Most notably, Reif announced the creation of the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili), to be led by Professor John Gabrieli, and a new effort to increase MIT's ability to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning by students from pre-kindergarten through high school (pK-12), to be led by Professor Angela Belcher. The announcement also included a program to support faculty innovations in MIT residential education and new work to enhance MIT's continuing education programs. In keeping with the high priority of these new efforts and of the entire field of digital learning, Professor Sanjay Sarma, now dean of digital learning, will oversee them in the newly created position of vice president for open learning, reporting directly to Reif. Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart, who will share responsibility with Sarma for several aspects of this work, predicts that the programs announced today will have "far-reaching and tremendous implications for education -- for MIT students as well as for students not at MIT."