June 17, 2018 - 3:45 pm
By Akshaiyaa V S
And God said, “Let there be light”.
Figuratively, this bible verse points towards light as the foundation of life; the driving force behind our psyche. Bright light is always associated with joy and victory. But sometimes, the best ideas come only in subtle darkness. In this case, it was in the form of algae.
A Unicellular alga known as Chlamydomonas, produces proteins called opsins which can convert light into an electrical...
June 14, 2018 - 3:30 pm
DeepMind’s advance could lead to machines that can make better sense of a scene.
by Will Knight
Machines will need to get a lot better at making sense of the world on their own if they are ever going to become truly intelligent.
DeepMind, the AI-focused subsidiary of Alphabet, has taken a step in that direction by making a computer program that builds a mental picture of the world all by itself. You might say that it learns to imagine the world...
June 11, 2018 - 3:00 pm
On June 11, 2018, Provost Martin A. Schmidt announced that Prof. Antonio Torralba has been named the inaugural director of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, effective immediately.
“The range of questions we aspire to explore through the Quest is simply breathtaking,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “There are moments in the history of science when the tools, the data, and the big questions are perfectly synchronized to achieve major advances. I...
June 10, 2018 - 3:15 pm
by Kyle Wiggers @Kyle_L_Wiggers
To describe Max Tegmark’s career as “storied” is to do the Swedish-American physicist a disservice. He’s a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute (FLI). He’s published more than 200 publications and developed data analysis tools for microwave background experiments. And he’s been elected as a...
June 8, 2018 - 4:00 pm
Dr. Nima Deghani (MIT Physics)
Abstract: Thalamus has traditionally been considered as only a relay source of cortical inputs, with hierarchically organized cortical circuits serially transforming thalamic signals to cognitively-relevant representations. Given the absence of local excitatory connections within the thalamus, the...
June 2, 2018 - 1:00 pm
By Andy Rosen Globe Staff June 02, 2018
Patrick Winston’s computer is learning about revenge, ambition, and murder. It knows that victory can make you happy. But it also knows you can’t be happy if you’re dead.
The computer had to learn these things in order to read “Macbeth” — or, rather, an extremely truncated version of Shakespeare’s blood-soaked Scottish tragedy. At just 37 sentences, the rough summary reduces the Bard’s immortal poetics to...
June 1, 2018 - 4:00 pm
Dr. SueYeon Chung (MIT, BCS Fellow in Computation)
Object manifolds arise when a neural population responds to an ensemble of sensory signals associated with different physical features (e.g., orientation, pose, scale, location, and intensity) of the same perceptual object. Object recognition and discrimination require classifying the manifolds in...
May 28, 2018 - 9:00 am
CBMM will be hosting a week long AFNI Training Bootcamp, on the MIT campus, from May 28th through June 1st, 2018.
A team of NIH Trainers will be leading this Bootcamp.
Attendance is free of charge. Registration is required, see link to bootcamp website included below.
What AFNI Is:
AFNI is a set of...
A team of NIH Trainers will be leading this Bootcamp.
Attendance is free of charge. Registration is required, see link to bootcamp website included below.
What AFNI Is:
AFNI is a set of...
May 25, 2018 - 9:00 am
The Annual CBMM Retreat will be held on Friday, May 25th, 2018, at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. This event is an important opportunity for the CBMM Community to come together, present current research and discuss ongoing and/or potential collaborations. The annual retreat is...
May 24, 2018 - 9:00 am
Wellesley College, Pendleton East, Room PNE-339
The study of intelligence draws upon background in a range of disciplines that include computer science, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This one-day workshop brings together educators from colleges and universities that are Broadening Participation Partners of the Center for Brains, Minds,...
May 23, 2018 - 9:30 am
Study tracks eye movement to determine how well people understand English as a foreign language.
Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office
May 22, 2018
Excerpt:
A study by MIT researchers has uncovered a new way of telling how well people are learning English: tracking their eyes.
That’s right. Using data generated by cameras trained on readers’ eyes, the research team has found that patterns of eye movement — particularly how long people’s eyes rest...
May 22, 2018 - 10:15 am
New evidence suggests a drop-off in results after the age of 17
The Economist
May 10, 2018
Excerpt: Those who want to learn a foreign language, or want their children to, often feel they are racing against the clock. People seem to get worse at languages as they age. Children often learn their first without any instruction, and can easily become multilingual with the right exposure. But the older people get, the harder it seems to be. Witness...
May 21, 2018 - 4:00 pm
Jonathan Miller, Associate Professor | Physics and Biology Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology...
Abstract: By a quirk of evolution, camouflaging octopus and cuttlefish report their visual perceptions by modulating their skin color and 3-d texture on time scales of seconds or minutes to match their surroundings (they are generative image modelers). Their survival demands that predators...
May 18, 2018 - 4:00 pm
Prof. Sasha Rakhlin
Please note change in date, talk was rescheduled from April 6th to May 18th.
May 11, 2018 - 4:00 pm
Prof. Nancy Lynch, MIT CSAIL
Title: An Algorithmic Theory of Brain Networks
This talk will describe my recent work with Cameron Musco and Merav Parter, on studying neural networks from the perspective of the field of Distributed Algorithms. In our project, we aim both to obtain interesting, elegant theoretical results, and...
This talk will describe my recent work with Cameron Musco and Merav Parter, on studying neural networks from the perspective of the field of Distributed Algorithms. In our project, we aim both to obtain interesting, elegant theoretical results, and...