Imagine you’re tasked with sending a team of football players onto a field to assess the condition of the grass (a likely task for them, of course). If you pick their positions randomly, they might cluster together in some areas while completely neglecting others. But if you give them a strategy, like spreading out uniformly across the field, you might...

In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects when they aren’t really there? A new study from the...

Ever been asked a question you only knew part of the answer to? To give a more informed response, your best move would be to phone a friend with more knowledge on the subject.This collaborative process can also help large language models (LLMs) improve their accuracy. Still, it’s been difficult to teach LLMs to recognize when they should collaborate...

To the untrained eye, a medical image like an MRI or X-ray appears to be a murky collection of black-and-white blobs. It can be a struggle to decipher where one structure (like a tumor) ends and another begins.  When trained to understand the boundaries of biological structures, AI systems can segment (or delineate) regions of interest that doctors...

Sam Madden, the College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing at MIT, has been named the new faculty head of computer science in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), effective Aug. 1.Madden succeeds Arvind, a longtime MIT professor and prolific computer scientist, who passed away in June.“Sam’s research...

Computer graphics and geometry processing research provide the tools needed to simulate physical phenomena like fire and flames, aiding the creation of visual effects in video games and movies as well as the fabrication of complex geometric shapes using tools like 3D printing.Under the hood, mathematical problems called partial differential equations...