January 31, 2022 - 10:45 am
[Foreword by CBMM's Mandana Sassanfar]
Taylor Baum first became involved with CBMM when she was selected to participate in the 2017 CBMM Undergraduate Summer Research Internships in Neuroscience. Taylor was invited to return to MIT as an undergraduate visiting student and continue her research project in Prof. Emery Brown's lab in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Dept. (MIT BCS.) In 2019, Taylor was accepted into the extremely competitive MIT...
January 27, 2022 - 11:15 am
MIT neuroscientists have developed a computer model that can answer that question as well as the human brain.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
The human brain is finely tuned not only to recognize particular sounds, but also to determine which direction they came from. By comparing differences in sounds that reach the right and left ear, the brain can estimate the location of a barking dog, wailing fire engine, or approaching car.
MIT...
January 20, 2022 - 1:45 pm
Sharing food and kissing are among the signals babies use to interpret their social world, according to a new study.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them.
MIT neuroscientists have now identified a specific signal that young children and even babies use to...
January 20, 2022 - 11:15 am
Even before they can talk, young babies know that two people must have a close relationship if they're willing to do to anything that involves swapping saliva.
Kissing on the mouth, sharing a spoon, taking licks off of someone's ice-cream cone — all of these activities generally only happen when people have an especially intimate relationship, and this fact appears to be obvious to infants who are only 8 to 10 months old, according to a new...
January 11, 2022 - 8:45 am
Nature Methods has named protein structure prediction the Method of the Year 2021.
If the Earth moves for you, among other reasons, the causes can be geologic or romantic. In science, in the context of predicting protein structure, you might have felt the ground tremble in late 2020 as you perused the results of the 14th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP). In this competition, scientists regularly test the prowess of...
December 17, 2021 - 10:00 am
Computational modeling shows that both our ears and our environment influence how we hear.
by Jennifer Michalowski
New research from MIT neuroscientists suggests that natural soundscapes have shaped our sense of hearing, optimizing it for the kinds of sounds we most often encounter.
In a study reported Dec. 14 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers led by McGovern Institute for Brain Research associate investigator Josh McDermott...
December 9, 2021 - 1:45 pm
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tokyo, December 9, 2021 - Fujitsu Limited and the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM) headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have achieved an important milestone in a joint initiative to deliver improvements in the accuracy of artificial intelligence (AI) models. The results of the research collaboration between Fujitsu and CBMM are published in a paper discussing computational...
December 7, 2021 - 4:00 pm
Singleton Auditorium (46-3002)
Prof. Michale Fee, Department Head & Dorflinger Professor, Dept. Brain and Cognitive Sciences;...
The Fall 2021 Brains, Minds, and Machines (BMM) Seminar Series will be hosted in a hybrid format. Please see the information included below regarding attending the event either in-person or remotely via Zoom connection
Please note, MIT is requiring that all attendees, including MIT COVIDpass users...
Please note, MIT is requiring that all attendees, including MIT COVIDpass users...
December 7, 2021 - 10:30 am
Tiny amounts of artificial noise can fool neural networks, but not humans. Some researchers are looking to neuroscience for a fix.
by Allison Whitten
Artificial intelligence sees things we don’t — often to its detriment. While machines have gotten incredibly good at recognizing images, it’s still easy to fool them. Simply add a tiny amount of noise to the input images, undetectable to the human eye, and the AI suddenly classifies school buses,...
December 6, 2021 - 2:15 pm
A new AI-powered, virtual platform uses real-world physics to simulate a rich and interactive audio-visual environment, enabling human and robotic learning, training, and experimental studies.
Lauren Hinkel | MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
While standing in a kitchen, you push some metal bowls across the counter into the sink with a clang, and drape a towel over the back of a chair. In another room, it sounds like some precariously stacked wooden...
November 30, 2021 - 4:00 pm
Dr. Andrei Barbu, Research Scientist, InfoLab, CSAIL MITYen-Ling Kuo, InfoLab, CSAIL MIT
Please note the change in date and format for this research meeting. This meeting will be held on Tues., Nov. 30, 2021; (Previously scheduled for Nov. 23rd.) This meeting will also be held in a fully remote format via Zoom.
Abstract: Language, and more generally the principle of compositionality,...
Abstract: Language, and more generally the principle of compositionality,...
November 18, 2021 - 11:00 am
We are reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach.
Demis Hassabis, Founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs (and DeepMind)
I believe we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of biological and medical research. Last year DeepMind’s breakthrough AI system AlphaFold2 was recognised as a solution to the 50-year-old grand challenge of protein folding, capable of predicting the 3D structure of a protein...
November 15, 2021 - 4:15 pm
By Dana G. Smith
What does your infant see when they look at you? Do you appear as just a round blob with some dark features? Or can your child already recognize that they are looking at a face, one belonging to the parent who will love and protect them?
Scientists, philosophers—and parents—have asked similar questions about what is innate and what is learned in the infant brain, going all the way back to the ancients. A study conducted using an...
November 15, 2021 - 11:00 am
Study suggests this area of the visual cortex emerges much earlier in development than previously thought.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
Within the visual cortex of the adult brain, a small region is specialized to respond to faces, while nearby regions show strong preferences for bodies or for scenes such as landscapes.
Neuroscientists have long hypothesized that it takes many years of visual experience for these areas to develop in children...
November 11, 2021 - 10:45 am
MIT researchers have incorporated social interactions into a framework for robotics, allowing robots to understand what helps or hinders one another.
The robots have been primed to learn social behaviors on their own.
This could help create a more caring environment when robots are working in certain sectors such as health and social care.
Scientists are currently working on making robots' social interactions with humans even more...