Given only a few frames of a video, humans can usually surmise what is happening and will happen on screen. If we see an early frame of stacked cans, a middle frame with a finger at the stack’s base, and a late frame showing the cans toppled over, we can guess that the finger knocked […]Continue reading

A child is presented with a picture of various shapes and is asked to find the big red circle. To come to the answer, she goes through a few steps of reasoning: First, find all the big things; next, find the big things that are red; and finally, pick out the big red thing that’s […]Continue reading

Artists may soon have at their disposal a new MIT-developed tool that could help them create digital characters, logos, and other graphics more quickly and easily.  Many digital artists rely on image vectorization, a technique that converts a pixel-based image into an image comprising groupings of clearly defined shapes. In this technique, points in the […]Continue reading

Humans have long been masters of dexterity, a skill that can largely be credited to the help of our eyes. Robots, meanwhile, are still catching up. Certainly there’s been some progress: For decades, robots in controlled environments like assembly lines have been able to pick up the same object over and over again. More recently, […]Continue reading

Each year MIT professors invite thousands of undergraduates into their labs to work on cutting edge research through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Starting this fall, the MIT Quest for Intelligence will add a suite of new projects to the mix, allowing students to explore the latest ideas and applications in human and machine […]Continue reading