October 8, 2017 - 1:30 pm
"Many leading AI researchers think that in a matter of decades, artificial intelligence will be able to do not merely some of our jobs, but all of our jobs, forever transforming life on Earth.
The reason that many dismiss this as science fiction is that we've traditionally thought of intelligence as something mysterious that can only exist in biological organisms, especially humans. But such carbon chauvinism is unscientific.
From my perspective...
October 6, 2017 - 4:00 pm
CBMM PIs
We will introduce the 4 proposed modules for CBMM's renewal. CBMM PIs will present and discuss their research plans and goals at CBMM for the next 5 years. The talks session will be followed by a reception/party (6pm-8pm) to celebrate the renewal by NSF.
Contact for details: Guy Ben-Yosef, gby@mit....
Contact for details: Guy Ben-Yosef, gby@mit....
October 5, 2017 - 4:30 pm
MIT News
By Julie Pryor | McGovern Institute for Brain Research
October 5, 2017
"The High-Risk, High-Reward Research (HRHR) program, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund, has awarded 86 grants to scientists with unconventional approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. Ten of the awardees are affiliated with MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard."
... "Ed Boyden, an associate...
October 5, 2017 - 4:15 pm
Prof. Ed Boyden has received the 2017 NIH Director's Transformative Research Award. This award promotes “cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approaches that could potentially create or challenge existing paradigms.”
Project Title: High-Performance Imaging Through Scattering Living Tissue
Grant ID: R01-DA-045549
Public Health Relevance Statement:
Imaging extended volumes of brain tissue, at rates that keep up with fast events like action potentials...
September 28, 2017 - 7:00 pm
WGBH Studios
Matt Peterson, Postdoc - MIT
Join CBMM's Postdoc Matt Peterson, and others, for BostonTalks Happy Hour: Connected
Connect with WGBH, local leaders, stories, trends and each other at BostonTalks. This September, it’s all about coming together. Hear from three speakers who are doing just that with their careers.
$10 admission -...
Connect with WGBH, local leaders, stories, trends and each other at BostonTalks. This September, it’s all about coming together. Hear from three speakers who are doing just that with their careers.
$10 admission -...
September 22, 2017 - 10:45 am
In September 2014, the Siemens Corporation generously established the CBMM Siemens Graduate Fellowship. This fellowship provides support, for one academic year, to an MIT graduate student whose research bridges two of the main CBMM disciplines (computer science, cognitive science, and neuroscience) and contributes to the CBMM goals of developing a computationally based understanding of human intelligence and establishing an engineering practice...
September 21, 2017 - 6:15 pm
Babies can learn that hard work pays off
Study finds infants try harder after seeing adults struggle to achieve a goal.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
September 21, 2017
"If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
A new study from MIT reveals that babies as young as 15 months can learn to follow this advice. The researchers found that babies who watched an adult struggle at two different tasks before succeeding tried harder at their own...
September 21, 2017 - 9:45 am
"Infants who saw a researcher keep at a difficult task tried harder themselves
By Yasemin Saplakoglu
Opening a jar of pickles should not be that difficult. And while you are busy mumbling, grimacing, hopping on one foot and holding the jar against your hip until the lid pops open, a young brain may be analyzing the spectacle and learning from it.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found infants who watched an adult...
September 20, 2017 - 9:30 am
"A startup called iSee thinks a new approach to AI will make self-driving cars better at dealing with unexpected situations.
by Will Knight
Boston’s notoriously unfriendly drivers and chaotic roads may be the perfect testing ground for a fundamentally different kind of self-driving car.
An MIT spin-off called iSee is developing and testing the autonomous driving system using a novel approach to artificial intelligence. Instead of relying on...
September 15, 2017 - 2:00 pm
Dr. David Ferrucci
Abstract: AI systems should not only propose solutions or answers but also explain why they make sense. Statistical machine learning is a powerful tool for discovering patterns in data, but, Dr. Ferrucci asks, can it produce understanding or enable humans to justify and take reasoned responsibility...
August 30, 2017 - 12:30 pm
ComText, from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, allows robots to understand contextual commands.
Adam Conner-Simons | Rachel Gordon | CSAIL
Despite what you might see in movies, today’s robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests.
For example, if you...
August 30, 2017 - 12:15 pm
Success rate is comparable to that of highly trained scientists performing the process manually.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
Recording electrical signals from inside a neuron in the living brain can reveal a great deal of information about that neuron’s function and how it coordinates with other cells in the brain. However, performing this kind of recording is extremely difficult, so only a handful of neuroscience labs around the world do it...
August 22, 2017 - 1:15 pm
Tweeted from our colleagues at IIT - "The story of our @iCub on @techinsider!"
Watch the video at the link below.
Here at CBMM, we are happy to count IIT as one of our partners. Their iCub robot is a great tool for exploring developmental robotics. While it is still very far from being able to learn like a human child, it is a tool to push AI in the right direction. The iCub is a useful platform to test models of children's learning and to...
July 31, 2017 - 10:15 am
by Theodore (Ted) Stark
When you see another person, your brain utilizes the fusiform facial area (FFA) to identify the face faster than anything else. Therefore, you can recognize faces before you can recall a person’s name. When viewing a face from the side (say 45 degrees), specific neurons fire within the FFA to recognize a face even at an angle. Researchers from MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) have reported a...
July 8, 2017 - 4:00 pm
"To effectively communicate with one another, we have to understand that everyone has their own unique feelings, thoughts, desires and beliefs. Without our ability to intuit the emotions and mental states of others, there would be little room for cooperation or empathy or the many other qualities that make us human.
Scientists use the term theory of mind to describe our capacity to accurately understand one another during social interaction. We...