Alex Shipps

Jan 9, 2025 | techxplore.com | Alex Shipps

Whether you're describing the sound of your faulty car engine or meowing like your neighbor's cat, imitating sounds with your voice can be a helpful way to relay a concept when words don't do the trick. Vocal imitation is the sonic equivalent of doodling a quick picture to communicate something you saw—except that instead of using a pencil to illustrate an image, you use your vocal tract to express a sound.

Jan 9, 2025 | newatlas.com | Michael Irving |Alex Shipps |Mike Grimmett

Imagine having a picture on your wall that completely changes when the room gets too warm. Engineers at MIT have created a new printing technology called Thermochromorph to make full-color images that switch in response to temperature. You might recognize thermochromic inks as those that change colors when warmed up to a certain temperature, like the old Hypercolor t-shirts.

Dec 20, 2024 | news.mit.edu | Alex Shipps

Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.

Dec 19, 2024 | news.mit.edu | Alex Shipps |Joanna Chen |Daniel Darling |Anne McGovern |Lincoln Laboratory

The IEEE recently announced the winners of their 2025 prestigious medals, technical awards, and fellowships. Four MIT faculty members, one staff member, and five alumni were recognized. Regina Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, received the IEEE Frances E.

Dec 12, 2024 | news.mit.edu | Alex Shipps

If someone advises you to “know your limits,” they’re likely suggesting you do things like exercise in moderation. To a robot, though, the motto represents learning constraints, or limitations of a specific task within the machine’s environment, to do chores safely and correctly. For instance, imagine asking a robot to clean your kitchen when it doesn’t understand the physics of its surroundings. How can the machine generate a practical multistep plan to ensure the room is spotless?