PO BAG 1: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

13 September 2016

This device can read the pages of a book without opening it

In this Monday, Sept. 12, 2016 photo, Barmak Heshmat poses outside his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Researchers at MIT have come up with a technology that can read the pages of a book without opening the cover, a development that could help museums better analyze antique books and ancient texts.

Leave it to the great minds at MIT and Georgia Tech to figure out a way to read the pages of a book without actually opening it.

A team of researchers from the two institutions pulled it off with a system they developed that looks like a cross between a camera and a microscope.

They said it could someday be used by museums to scan the contents of old books too fragile to handle or to examine paintings to confirm their authenticity or understand the artist's creative process.

27 January 2016

Marvin Minsky, pioneer of artificial intelligence, dies

In this July 14, 1987, file photo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Marvin Minsky, speaks to the audience during a panel discussion whose topic was, "Artificial Intelligence: Society's Atlas or Achilles," at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence at MIT who saw parallels in the functioning of the human brain and computers has died. The university said Minsky died Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016, at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston of a cerebral hemorrhage. Minsky was 88.

Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who saw parallels in the functioning of the human brain and computers, died Sunday at age 88.

The university said Minsky died Sunday at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage.

Minsky viewed the brain as a machine whose functioning can be studied and replicated in a computer, and he considered how machines might be endowed with common sense.