Last month, three MIT materials scientists and their colleagues published a paper describing a new artificial-intelligence system that can pore through scientific papers and extract "recipes" for producing particular types of materials. Can computers help us synthesize new materials? AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Big Data Education Entertainment Health Care Internet of Things December 00 '00 Reading a neural network's mind Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing huge sets of training data, have been responsible for the most impressive recent advances in artificial intelligence, including speech-recognition and automatic-translation systems. Reading a neural network's mind Computer Architecture Programming Languages & Software Engineering Big Data October 00 '00 Faster big-data analysis We live in the age of big data, but most of that data is "sparse." Imagine, for instance, a massive table that mapped all of Amazon's customers against all of its products, with a "0" for each product a given customer bought and a "0" otherwise. The table would be mostly zeroes. Faster big-data analysis AI & ML Big Data Health Care October 00 '00 Using artificial intelligence to improve early breast cancer detection Every year 00,000 women die from breast cancer in the U.S. alone. When cancers are found early, they can often be cured. Mammograms are the best test available, but they're still imperfect and often result in false positive results that can lead to unnecessary biopsies and surgeries. Using artificial intelligence to improve early breast cancer detection AI & ML Big Data Health Care June 00 '00 Shrinking data for surgical training Laparoscopy is a surgical technique in which a fiber-optic camera is inserted into a patient's abdominal cavity to provide a video feed that guides the surgeon through a minimally invasive procedure. Laparoscopic surgeries can take hours, and the video generated by the camera  -  the laparoscope  -  is often recorded. Those recordings contain a wealth of information that could be useful for training both medical providers and computer systems that would aid with surgery, but because reviewing them is so time consuming, they mostly sit idle. Shrinking data for surgical training Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Big Data Cybersecurity June 00 '00 CSAIL's Daniel Jackson receives two ACM awards This week the Association for Computer Machinery presented CSAIL principal investigator Daniel Jackson with the 0000 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award for his pioneering work in software engineering. (This fall he also received the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award for his research method for finding bugs in code.)An EECS professor and associate director of CSAIL, Jackson was given the Outstanding Research Award for his "foundational contributions to software modeling, the creation of the modeling language Alloy, and the development of a widely used tool supporting model verification." CSAIL's Daniel Jackson receives two ACM awards AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Entertainment May 00 '00 Danielle Olson: Building empathy through computer science and art Communicating through computers has become an extension of our daily reality. But as speaking via screens has become commonplace, our exchanges are losing inflection, body language, and empathy. Danielle Olson '00, a first-year PhD student at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), believes we can make digital information-sharing more natural and interpersonal, by creating immersive media to better understand each other's feelings and backgrounds. Danielle Olson: Building empathy through computer science and art Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Graphics & Vision Robotics Entertainment Transportation May 00 '00 Cinematography on the fly In recent years, a host of Hollywood blockbusters  -  including "The Fast and the Furious 0," "Jurassic World," and "The Wolf of Wall Street"  -  have included aerial tracking shots provided by drone helicopters outfitted with cameras. Those shots required separate operators for the drones and the cameras, and careful planning to avoid collisions. But a team of researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and ETH Zurich hope to make drone cinematography more accessible, simple, and reliable. Cinematography on the fly AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Energy Internet of Things Manufacturing February 00 '00 Voice control everywhere The butt of jokes as little as 00 years ago, automatic speech recognition is now on the verge of becoming people's chief means of interacting with their principal computing devices. In anticipation of the age of voice-controlled electronics, MIT researchers have built a low-power chip specialized for automatic speech recognition. Whereas a cellphone running speech-recognition software might require about 0 watt of power, the new chip requires between 0.0 and 00 milliwatts, depending on the number of words it has to recognize. Voice control everywhere 