Researchers have created a solar cell with a record 39.5% efficiency under 1-sun global illumination. This is believed to be the highest efficiency solar cell of any type, measured using standard 1-sun conditions. [...]

Researchers recently discovered a helicoidal-shaped defect in layered polymers, uncovering how solvents can diffuse through layers and produce color changes. [...]

As robots increasingly join people on the factory floor, in warehouses and elsewhere on the job, dividing up who will do which tasks grows in complexity and importance. People are better suited for some tasks, robots for others. And in some cases, it is advantageous to spend time teaching a [...]

Mastering control over the dynamic interplay among optical, chemical and mechanical behavior in single-material, liquid crystalline elastomers, results in microposts that combine bending, twisting and turning into complex dances. The advancement could contribute toward further development of soft robotics and other devices. [...]

New research illustrates neuromorphic technology is up to sixteen times more energy-efficient for large deep learning networks than other AI systems. [...]

Researchers have developed an algorithmic planner that helps delegate tasks to humans and robots. The planner, 'Act, Delegate or Learn' (ADL), considers a list of tasks and decides how best to assign them. The researchers asked three questions: When should a robot act to complete a task? When should a [...]

Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, the president of Iceland, visited MIT on Friday, engaging in talks with several campus leaders and professors, and touring the Media Lab. Jóhannesson visited the Institute along with a substantial delegation of officials and scholars from Iceland. They met with MIT scholars, who delivered a variety of presentations [...]

Engineers now report selective breakdown of a particularly stubborn class of PFAS called fluorinated carboxylic acids (FCAs) by common microorganisms. Under anaerobic conditions, a carbon-carbon double bond is crucial for the shattering the ultra-strong carbon-fluorine bond by microbial communities. The resulting products could be relayed to other microorganisms for defluorination [...]

Researchers developed a low-cost gel film made of abundant materials that can pull drinkable water from the air in even the driest climates. [...]

Researchers have developed a trajectory-planning system for autonomous vehicles that enables them to travel from a starting point to a target location safely, even when there are many different uncertainties in the environment, such as unknown variations in the shapes, sizes, and locations of obstacles. [...]

Researchers have developed soft robots that are capable of navigating complex environments, such as mazes, without input from humans or computer software. [...]

Researchers have discovered a new effect in two-dimensional conductive systems that promises improved performance of terahertz detectors. [...]

Researchers develop a new method to simultaneously measure flow and oxygen. [...]

Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play Atari video games, caption images, chat, and stack blocks with a real robot arm, the Alphabet-owned AI lab announced. All in all, Gato can do 604 different tasks.  But while Gato is undeniably fascinating, in [...]

The EU AI Act may turn out to be one of the most influential legal frameworks in the world. Here is how, and why, the Mozilla Foundation is engaging with it, and how you can get involved too [...]

The miseducation of algorithms is a critical problem; when artificial intelligence mirrors unconscious thoughts, racism, and biases of the humans who generated these algorithms, it can lead to serious harm. Computer programs, for example, have wrongly flagged Black defendants as twice as likely to reoffend as someone who’s white. When [...]

Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) student Sarah Cen remembers the lecture that sent her down the track to an upstream question. At a talk on ethical artificial intelligence, the speaker brought up a variation on the famous trolley problem, which outlines a philosophical choice between two undesirable outcomes. The speaker’s [...]

Even as rapid improvements in artificial intelligence have led to speculation over significant changes in the health care landscape, the adoption of AI in health care has been minimal. A 2020 survey by Brookings, for example, found that less than 1 percent of job postings in health care required AI-related [...]

After data privacy and GDPR, the EU wants to leave its mark on AI by regulating it with the EU AI Act. Here's what it is, what it means for the world at large, when it's expected to take effect, and what experts from the Mozilla Foundation have to say [...]

Ubiquitous computing has triggered an avalanche of data that is beyond human processing capabilities. AI technologies have emerged as the only viable way to turn this data into information. As more computing produces more data, more computing power is needed to power AI. Next generation AI will soon look to [...]

Experimental observations conclude learning is mainly performed by neural dendrite trees as opposed to modifying solely through the strength of the synapses, as previously believed. [...]