Radio frequency ID tags were supposed to revolutionize supply chain management. The dirt-cheap, battery-free tags, which receive power wirelessly from scanners and then broadcast identifying numbers, enable warehouse managers to log inventory much more efficiently than they could by reading box numbers and recording them manually. But the scale of modern retail operations makes even…
Using Bitcoin To Prevent Identity Theft
A reaction to the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin is a digital-currency scheme designed to wrest control of the monetary system from central banks. With Bitcoin, anyone can mint money, provided he or she can complete a complex computation quickly enough. Through a set of clever protocols, that computational hurdle prevents the system from being coopted…
Making Better Decisions When Outcomes are Uncertain
Markov decision processes are mathematical models used to determine the best courses of action when both current circumstances and future consequences are uncertain. They’ve had a huge range of applications — in natural-resource management, manufacturing, operations management, robot control, finance, epidemiology, scientific-experiment design, and tennis strategy, just to name a few. But analyses involving Markov…
Security for Multirobot Systems
Distributed planning, communication, and control algorithms for autonomous robots make up a major area of research in computer science. But in the literature on multirobot systems, security has gotten relatively short shrift. In the latest issue of the journal Autonomous Robots, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and their colleagues present a new technique for preventing malicious hackers from commandeering robot teams’…
Inferring Urban Travel Patterns from Cellphone Data
In making decisions about infrastructure development and resource allocation, city planners rely on models of how people move through their cities, on foot, in cars, and on public transportation. Those models are largely based on surveys of residents’ travel habits. But conducting surveys and analyzing their results is costly and time consuming: A city might…
How to Stay Anonymous Online
Anonymity networks protect people living under repressive regimes from surveillance of their Internet use. But the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in the most popular of these networks — Tor — has prompted computer scientists to try to come up with more secure anonymity schemes. At the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science…
Eye-Tracking System Uses Ordinary Cellphone Camera
For the past 40 years, eye-tracking technology — which can determine where in a visual scene people are directing their gaze — has been widely used in psychological experiments and marketing research, but it’s required pricey hardware that has kept it from finding consumer applications. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and…
Mixing Solids and Liquids Enhances Optical Properties of Both
By immersing glass particles in a fluid, researchers at MIT’s Media Lab and Harvard University are exploring a new mechanism for modifying an optical device’s diffusivity, or the extent to which it scatters light. In its current form, the new diffuser could be used to calibrate a wide range of imaging systems, but the researchers…
Physicists Predict Previously Unseen Phenomena In Exotic Materials
Discovered just five years ago, topological semimetals are materials with unusual physical properties that could make them useful for future electronics. In the latest issue of Nature Physics, MIT researchers report a new theoretical characterization of topological semimetals’ electrical properties that accurately describes all known topological semimetals and predicts several new ones. Guided by their model,…
A Method to Image Black Holes
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Harvard University have developed a new algorithm that could help astronomers produce the first image of a black hole. The algorithm would stitch together data collected from radio telescopes scattered around the globe, under the auspices of an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope.…
We Know Where You Live: How Snoopers Use Your Location Data
Researchers at MIT and Oxford University have shown that the location stamps on just a handful of Twitter posts — as few as eight over the course of a single day — can be enough to disclose the addresses of the poster’s home and workplace to a relatively low-tech snooper. The tweets themselves might be…
Ingestible Origami Robot
In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery…
Control Algorithm for Teams of Robots Factors in Moving Obstacles
Planning algorithms for teams of robots fall into two categories: centralized algorithms, in which a single computer makes decisions for the whole team, and decentralized algorithms, in which each robot makes its own decisions based on local observations. With centralized algorithms, if the central computer goes offline, the whole system falls apart. Decentralized algorithms handle…
Phone-Based Laser Rangefinder Works Outdoors
The Microsoft Kinect was a boon to robotics researchers. The cheap, off-the-shelf depth sensor allowed them to quickly and cost-effectively prototype innovative systems that enable robots tomap, interpret, and navigate their environments. But sensors like the Kinect, which use infrared light to gauge depth, are easily confused by ambient infrared light. Even indoors, they tend to require low-light…
Enabling Human-Robot Rescue Teams
Autonomous robots performing a joint task send each other continual updates: “I’ve passed through a door and am turning 90 degrees right.” “After advancing 2 feet I’ve encountered a wall. I’m turning 90 degrees right.” “After advancing 4 feet I’ve encountered a wall.” And so on. Computers, of course, have no trouble filing this information…
A Virtual ‘Guide Dog’ for Navigation
MIT researchers have developed a low-power chip for processing 3-D camera data that could help visually impaired people navigate their environments. The chip consumes only one-thousandth as much power as a conventional computer processor executing the same algorithms. Using their chip, the researchers also built a prototype of a complete navigation system for the visually…
Polymer Nanowires That Could Offer Route to Tinier Chip Components
Since the 1960s, computer chips have been built using a process called photolithography. But in the past five years, chip features have gotten smaller than the wavelength of light, which has required some ingenious modifications of photolithographic processes. Keeping up the rate of circuit miniaturization that we’ve come to expect—as predicted by Moore’s Law—will eventually…
Optoelectronic Microprocessors Built Using Existing Chip Manufacturing
Using only processes found in existing microchip fabrication facilities, researchers at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Colorado have produced a working optoelectronic microprocessor, which computes electronically but uses light to move information. Optical communication could dramatically reduce chips’ power consumption, which is not only desirable in its own right…
Nanodevices At One-Hundredth The Cost
Microelectromechanical systems — or MEMS — were a $12 billion business in 2014. But that market is dominated by just a handful of devices, such as the accelerometers that reorient the screens of most smartphones. That’s because manufacturing MEMS has traditionally required sophisticated semiconductor fabrication facilities, which cost tens of millions of dollars to build.…
Gauging Materials’ Physical Properties from Video
Last summer, MIT researchers published a paper describing an algorithm that can recover intelligible speech from the analysis of the minute vibrations of objects in video captured through soundproof glass. In June, at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, researchers from the same groups will describe how the technique can be adapted to…
Cloud Security Reaches Silicon
In the last 10 years, computer security researchers have shown that malicious hackers don’t need to see your data in order to steal your data. From the pattern in which your computer accesses its memory banks, adversaries can infer a shocking amount about what’s stored there. The risk of such attacks is particularly acute in the cloud,…
Scientists Develop Probabilistic Programming Languages
Most recent advances in artificial intelligence — such as mobile apps that convert speech to text — are the result of machine learning, in which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns. To make machine-learning applications easier to build, computer scientists have begun developing so-called probabilistic programming languages, which let…
Better Sensors for Medical Imaging, Contraband Detection
Magnetic-field detector is 1,000 times more efficient than its predecessors. MIT researchers have developed a new, ultra-sensitive magnetic-field detector that is 1,000 times more energy-efficient than its predecessors. It could lead to miniaturized, battery-powered devices for medical and materials imaging, contraband detection, and even geological exploration. Magnetic-field detectors, or magnetometers, are already used for all…
Teaching Programming to Preschoolers with Interactive Robots
System that lets children program a robot using stickers embodies new theories about programming languages. Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory are developing a system that enables young children to program interactive robots by affixing stickers to laminated sheets of paper. View: Programming a Robot with Stickers Not only could the system introduce children to…
Quantum Sensor’s Advantages Survive Entanglement Breakdown
Preserving the fragile quantum property known as entanglement isn’t necessary to reap benefits. The extraordinary promise of quantum information processing — solving problems that classical computers can’t, perfectly secure communication — depends on a phenomenon called “entanglement,” in which the physical states of different quantum particles become interrelated. But entanglement is very fragile, and the…