Category: Uncategorized
How Hallucinatory A.I. Helps Science Dream Up Big Breakthroughs
Artificial intelligence often gets criticized because it makes up information that appears to be factual, known as hallucinations. The plausible fakes have roiled not only chatbot sessions but lawsuits and medical records. For a time last year, a patently false claim from a new Google chatbot helped drive down the company’s market value by an estimated $100 billion.In the universe of science, however, innovators are finding that A.I. hallucinations can be remarkably useful. The smart machines, it turns out, are dreaming up riots of unrealities that help scientists track cancer, design drugs, invent medical devices, uncover weather phenomena and even win the Nobel Prize. Learn more
MIT researchers introduce Boltz-1, a fully open-source model for predicting biomolecular structures
MIT scientists have released a powerful, open-source AI model, called Boltz-1, that could significantly accelerate biomedical research and drug development. Developed by a team of researchers in the MIT Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, Boltz-1 is the first fully open-source model that achieves state-of-the-art performance at the level of AlphaFold3, the model from Google DeepMind that predicts the 3D structures of proteins and other biological molecules. MIT graduate students Jeremy Wohlwend and Gabriele Corso were the lead developers of Boltz-1, along with MIT Jameel Clinic Research Affiliate Saro Passaro and MIT professors of electrical engineering and computer science Regina Barzilay and Tommi Jaakkola. Wohlwend and Corso presented the model at a Dec. 5 event at MIT’s Stata Center, where they said their ultimate goal is to foster global collaboration, accelerate discoveries, and provide a robust platform for advancing biomolecular modeling. Learn more
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw named in Forbes’ list of World’s Most Powerful Women
Biocon Founder, Chairman and Managing Director and Advisory Board member of MIT Jameel Clinic Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw was recognized in Forbes' 2024 list of the World's Most Powerful Women. The list recognizes 100 exceptional women in fields such as finance, technology, media and beyond, who have significant visibility and economic impact, influencing over 1 billion people around the world. Learn more
Empowering systemic racism research at MIT and beyond
At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the conditions and culture of Black people in Philadelphia, documenting also the racist attitudes and beliefs that pervaded the white society around them. He described how unequal outcomes in domains like health could be attributed not only to racist ideas, but to racism embedded in American institutions.Almost 125 years later, the concept of “systemic racism” is central to the study of race. Centuries of data collection and analysis, like the work of Du Bois, document the mechanisms of racial inequity in law and institutions, and attempt to measure their impact.
“There’s extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequity in essentially all sectors of American society,” explains Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, who directs the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), where she also co-leads the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR). “Newer research demonstrates how computational technologies, typically trained or reliant on historical data, can further entrench racial bias. But these same tools can also help to identify racially inequitable outcomes, to understand their causes and impacts, and even contribute to proposing solutions.” Learn more
