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This semester, college students and postdocs throughout MIT have been invited to submit concepts for the first-ever MIT Ignite: Generative AI Entrepreneurship Competition. Over 100 groups submitted proposals for startups that make the most of generative synthetic intelligence applied sciences to develop options throughout a various vary of disciplines together with human well being, local weather change, schooling, and workforce dynamics.
On Oct. 30, 12 finalists pitched their concepts in entrance of a panel of knowledgeable judges and a packed room in Samberg Conference Center.
“MIT has a responsibility to help shape a future of AI innovation that is broadly beneficial — and to do that, we need a lot of great ideas. So, we turned to a pretty reliable source of great ideas: MIT’s highly entrepreneurial students and postdocs,” mentioned MIT President Sally Kornbluth in her opening remarks on the occasion.
The MIT Ignite occasion is a part of a broader concentrate on generative AI at MIT put forth by Kornbluth. This fall, throughout the Institute, researchers and college students are exploring alternatives to contribute their information on generative AI, figuring out new purposes, minimizing dangers, and using it for the good thing about society. This occasion — co-organized by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and supported by MIT’s School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management — impressed younger researchers to contribute to the dialogue and innovate in generative AI.
Serving as co-chairs for the occasion have been Aude Oliva, MIT director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and a principal investigator within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Bill Aulet, the Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice on the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the Martin Trust Center; and Dina Katabi, the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, director of the Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, and a CSAIL principal investigator.
Twelve groups of scholars and postdocs have been competing for quite a few prizes, together with 5 MIT Ignite Flagship Prizes of $15,000 every, a particular first-year undergraduate pupil staff Flagship Prize, and runner-up prizes. All prizes have been offered by the MIT-IBM AI Watson Lab. Teams have been judged on their mission’s progressive purposes of generative AI, feasibility, potential for real-world influence, and the standard of presentation.
After the 12 groups showcased their expertise, its potential to handle a difficulty, and the staff’s skill to execute the plan, a panel of judges deliberated. As the viewers waited for the outcomes, remarks have been made by Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation; Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and David Schmittlein, the John C. Head III Dean and professor of promoting on the MIT Sloan School of Management. The pupil winners included:
MIT Ignite Flagship Prizes
eMote (Philip Cherner, Julia Sebastien, Caroline Lige Zhang, and Daeun Yoo): Sometimes figuring out and expressing feelings is troublesome, notably for these on the alexithymia spectrum; additional, remedy could be costly. eMote’s app permits customers to determine their feelings, visualize them as artwork utilizing the co-creative strategy of generative AI, and mirror on them by journaling, thereby aiding faculty counselors and therapists.
LeGT.ai (Julie Shi, Jessica Yuan, and Yubing Cui): Legal processes round immigration could be sophisticated and expensive. LeGT.ai goals to democratize authorized information. Using a platform with a big language mannequin, immediate engineering, and semantic search, the staff will streamline a chatbot for completion, analysis, and drafting of paperwork for companies, in addition to enhance pre-screening and preliminary consultations.
Sunona (Emmi Mills, Selin Kocalar, Srihitha Dasari, and Karun Kaushik): About half of a health care provider’s day is consumed by medical documentation and medical notes. To handle this, Sunona harnesses audio transcription and a big language mannequin to rework audio from a health care provider’s go to into notes and have extraction, affording suppliers extra time of their day.
UltraNeuro (Mahdi Ramadan, Adam Gosztolai, Alaa Khaddaj, and Samara Khater): For about one in seven adults, spinal wire damage, stroke, or illness will induce motor impairment and/or paralysis. UltraNeuro’s neuroprosthetics will assist sufferers to regain a few of their day by day talents with out invasive mind implants. Their expertise leverages an electroencephalogram, sensible sensors, and a multimodal AI system (muscle EMG, laptop imaginative and prescient, eye actions) skilled on 1000’s of actions to plan exact limb actions.
UrsaTech (Rui Zhou, Jerry Shan, Kate Wang, Alan He, and Rita Zhang): Education at this time is marked by disparities and overburdened educators. UrsaTech’s platform makes use of a multimodal massive language mannequin and diffusion fashions to create classes, dynamic content material, and assessments to help lecturers and learners. The system additionally has immersive studying with AI brokers for lively studying for on-line and offline use.
First-Year Undergraduate Student Team MIT Ignite Flagship Prize
Alikorn (April Ren and Ayush Nayak): Drug discovery accounts for important biotech prices. Alikorn’s massive language model-powered platform goals to streamline the method of making and simulating new molecules, utilizing a generative adversarial community, a Monte-Carlo algorithm to vet essentially the most promising candidates, and a physics simulation to find out the chemical properties.
Runner-up Prizes
Autonomous Cyber (James “Patrick” O’Brien, Madeline Linde, Rafael Turner, and Bohdan Volyanyuk): Code safety audits require experience and are costly. “Fuzzing” code — injecting invalid or surprising inputs to disclose software program vulnerabilities — could make software program considerably safer. Autonomous Cyber’s system leverages massive language fashions to robotically combine “fuzzers” into databases.
Gen EGM (Noah Bagazinski and Kristen Edwards): Making knowledgeable socioeconomic growth insurance policies requires proof and information. Gen EGM’s massive language mannequin system expedites the method by inspecting and analyzing literature, after which produces an proof hole map (EGM), suggesting potential influence areas.
Mattr AI (Leandra Tejedor, Katie Chen, and Eden Adler): Datasets which can be used to coach AI fashions usually have problems with variety, fairness, and completeness. Mattr AI addresses this with generative AI with a big language mannequin and steady diffusion fashions to reinforce datasets.
Neuroscreen (Andrew Lu, Chonghua Xue, and Grant Robinson): Screening sufferers to doubtlessly be a part of a dementia medical trial is expensive, usually takes years, and largely leads to an ineligibility. Neuroscreen employs AI to extra rapidly assess sufferers’ dementia causes, resulting in extra profitable enrollment in medical trials and therapy of situations.
The Data Provenance Initiative (Naana Obeng-Marnu, Jad Kabbara, Shayne Longpre, William Brannon, and Robert Mahari): Datasets which can be used to coach AI fashions, notably massive language fashions, usually have lacking or incorrect metadata, inflicting concern for authorized and moral points. The Data Provenance Initiative makes use of AI-assisted annotation to audit datasets, monitoring the lineage and authorized standing of knowledge, enhancing information transparency, legality, and moral issues round information.
Theia (Jenny Yao, Hongze Bo, Jin Li, Ao Qu, and Hugo Huang): Scientific analysis, and on-line dialogue round it, usually happens in silos. Theia’s platform goals to carry these partitions down. Generative AI expertise will summarize papers and assist to information analysis instructions, offering a service for students in addition to the broader scientific group.
After the MIT Ignite competitors, all 12 groups chosen to current have been invited to a networking occasion as a right away first step to creating their concepts and prototypes a actuality. Additionally, they have been invited to additional develop their concepts with the help of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship by StartMIT or MIT Fuse and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
“In the months since I’ve arrived [at MIT], I’ve learned a lot about how MIT folks think about entrepreneurship and how it’s really built into everything that everyone at the Institute does, from first-year students to faculty to alumni — they are really motivated to get their ideas out into the world,” mentioned President Kornbluth. “Entrepreneurship is an essential element for our goal of organizing for positive impact.”
