News by Subject Technology & Engineering

In a new pair of papers, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) explore ways for computers to help doctors make better medical decisions.

Builders of hydroelectric dams are required to perform seismic hazard studies before their designs are approved.

Fewer trips to the dentist may be in your future, and you have mussels to thank.

Given the possible security vulnerabilities related to developments in synthetic biology -- a field that uses technologies to modify or create organisms or biological components -- a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine proposes a framework to identify and prioritize potential areas of concern associated with the field.

New research from the University of Liverpool highlights the usefulness of video game players as unmanned aircraft operators.

Though soccer players have assigned roles, it's routine for players to swap positions during the course of a game, or even of a single play. Other players and most fans recognize when this occurs and now, thanks to new work on multi-agent imitation learning, so can a computer.

The idea that artificial intelligence will someday be able to understand and even generate narratives has inspired and motivated researchers for years. A question inextricably bound to both lines of research remains unresolved, however: can AI recognize a good story if it sees one? In the first large-scale attempt to tackle this challenging problem, scientists at Disney Research and the University of Massachusetts Boston have developed neural networks that can evaluate short narratives.

A pro-tumor environment in the cell can encourage a gene to produce an alternative form of RNA that enables cancer to spread, report researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina in Nature Cell Biology.

In a paper published in Nature Physics, Northeastern University Department of Physics Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Alain Karma, in collaboration with his postdoctoral research associate Chih-Hung Chen and Professor Eran Bouchbinder of the Weizmann Institute of Science's Chemical Physics Department, discovered the mechanism that causes cracks to behave strangely when they spread very rapidly in brittle materials.