August 25, 2022 - 6:30 am
MIT scientists have discovered a population of neurons that light up whenever we see images of food.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
A gooey slice of pizza. A pile of crispy French fries. Ice cream dripping down a cone on a hot summer day. When you look at any of these foods, a specialized part of your visual cortex lights up, according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists.
This newly discovered population of food-responsive neurons is located...
August 12, 2022 - 12:45 pm
By Kim Hyun-bin
Hyundai Motor Group announced Friday the launch of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute with the goal of making fundamental advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and intelligent machines. Hyundai and Boston Dynamics will make an initial investment of more than $400 million in the new institute, which will be led by Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics.
As a research-first organization, the institute will work on...
August 12, 2022 - 10:15 am
Tomaso Poggio and team were awarded the 2021 Helmholtz Prize for their paper HMDB: A large video database for human motion recognition (H. Kuehne; H. Jhuang; E. Garrote; T. Poggio; T. Serre). The paper has been cited over 1400 times with 6 patent citations.
The Helmholtz Prize is an award given biyearly by the TCPAMI at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) for fundamental contributions in Computer Vision. The award recognizes...
August 12, 2022 - 10:00 am
From Amnon Shashua's LinkedIn:
"Being entered into the Automotive Hall of Fame as this year’s mobility innovator is an incredible honor.
It is even a greater privilege to be someone outside of the mainstream of car design, development, or racing to receive this honor.
I am a computer scientist, an academic professor at heart, who 23 years ago realized that the car industry is the ideal platform for innovation and #AI at...
July 18, 2022 - 11:00 am
On July 11, 2022 at the nineteenth International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in knowledge-based systems (IPMU 2022) in Milan, Italy, Prof. Tomaso Poggio delivered the plenary lecture on "The Science and Engineering of Intelligence." At this time, Prof. Poggio was presented with the Kampe de Feriet award.
The Kampe de Feriet award is given on the occasion of each IPMU Conference.
Previous winners:
The first...
June 16, 2022 - 2:30 pm
A new computational model could explain differences in recognizing facial emotions.
Matthew Hutson | McGovern Institute for Brain Research
Many of us easily recognize emotions expressed in others’ faces. A smile may mean happiness, while a frown may indicate anger. Autistic people often have a more difficult time with this task. It’s unclear why. But new research, published June 15 in The Journal of Neuroscience, sheds light on the inner...
May 30, 2022 - 2:15 pm
Hate is a powerful negative emotion, but a word that is easy to say. For example, many of us profess to hate public figures, such as politicians. One has only to browse social media to find declarations of hate for those in the public eye. So, is hate a hard-wired emotion in people? Medical News Today looked at the science behind why people feel hate.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines hate as being one of the following:
intense hostility...
May 25, 2022 - 2:00 pm
Podcast description [translated to English from Italian by Google]: They are two pioneers of artificial intelligence. Both Europeans transplanted to the United States, they are global reference points in research on the mechanisms of vision, perception in general and deep learning. The Italian physicist Tomaso Poggio, director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the French...
May 24, 2022 - 2:30 pm
Postbac Jessica Chomik-Morales hopes to inspire the next generation of Spanish-speaking scientists with her podcast, “Mi Ultima Neurona.”
Jennifer Michalowski | McGovern Institute for Brain Research
Jessica Chomik-Morales had a bicultural childhood. She was born in Boca Raton, Florida, where her parents had come seeking a better education for their daughter than she would have access to in Paraguay. But when she wasn’t in school, Chomik-Morales...
May 24, 2022 - 2:30 pm
Brown and three other scientists recognized for advancing statistical, theoretical analyses of neuroscience data.
David Orenstein | Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
The Gruber Foundation announced on May 17 that Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, has won the 2022 Gruber Neuroscience Prize along with neurophysicists Laurence Abbott of Columbia University,...
April 28, 2022 - 2:15 pm
Prestigious honor society announces more than 250 new members.
Seven MIT faculty members are among more than 250 leaders from academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced Thursday.
One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy publications, as...
April 27, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Excerpt:
"The researchers, led by Nancy Kanwisher and collaborator Josh McDermott, had previously identified a population of neurons in the auditory cortex that respond specifically to music by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on subjects as they listened to a recording of 165 sounds. But they were able to gather much more precise information by directly recording electrical activity in the brains of 15 people via electrodes...
April 25, 2022 - 10:30 am
Dr. Kelsey Allen, MIT PhD '21, awarded the prestigious Glushko Dissertation Prize in cognitive sciences for her PhD thesis entitled “Learning to act with objects, relations and physics."
"The goals of these prizes are to increase the prominence of cognitive science, and encourage students to engage in interdisciplinary efforts to understand minds and intelligent systems. The hope is that the prizes will recognize and honor young researchers...
April 14, 2022 - 1:15 pm
Fellowship funds graduate studies for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants.
Julia Mongo | Office of Distinguished Fellowships
MIT graduate student Fernanda De La Torre, alumna Trang Luu ’18, SM ’20, and senior Syamantak Payra are recipients of the 2022 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.
De La Torre, Luu, and Payra are among 30 New Americans selected from a pool of over 1,800 applicants. The fellowship honors...
April 6, 2022 - 4:15 pm
When artificial intelligence is tasked with visually identifying objects and faces, it assigns specific components of its network to face recognition — just like the human brain.
Jennifer Michalowski | McGovern Institute for Brain Research
The human brain seems to care a lot about faces. It’s dedicated a specific area to identifying them, and the neurons there are so good at their job that most of us can readily recognize thousands of...