News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Columbia University are trying to make the process faster and easier: In a new paper, they've developed InstantCAD, a tool that lets designers interactively edit, improve, and optimize CAD models using a more streamlined and intuitive workflow.

In the summer of 2012, two undergraduate students tackled a problem that plant ecology experts had overlooked for 30 years. The students demonstrated that different plant species vary in how they take in carbon dioxide and emit water through the pores in their leaves. The data boosted the accuracy of mathematical models of carbon and water fluxes through plant leaves by 30 to 60 percent.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) believe that analyzing photos like these could help us learn recipes and better understand people's eating habits. In a new paper with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), the team trained an artificial intelligence system called Pic2Recipe to look at a photo of food and be able to predict the ingredients and suggest similar recipes.

Scientists at Disney Research and the University of California, Davis have found that the way a person describes the content of a photo can provide important clues for computer vision programs to determine where various things appear in the image.

Disney Research used deep learning methods to develop a new means of assessing complex audience reactions to movies via facial expressions and demonstrated that the new technique outperformed conventional methods.

Researchers at Linköping University have developed a method to increase by a factor of five the computing power of a standard algorithm when performed in one type of standard chip, FPGA. The new method is both simple and smart, but the road to publication has been long.