LIGO prototype

Developed by Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62, and his college students, this Nineteen Seventies prototype led to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), a large-scale physics experiment that was finally in a position to detect the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s Basic Principle of Relativity. The work earned Weiss the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics.

“The experiments that LIGO was in a position to facilitate really feel like magic to me, as a non-physicist,” Nuñez says. “Are you able to think about what it was prefer to be there after they came upon it labored? What a tremendous second for humanity!”

Kismet

One in every of first social robots designed to simulate social interactions, Kismet was created within the Nineties by Cynthia Breazeal, SM ’93, ScD ’00, who’s now MIT’s dean for digital studying and head of the Private Robots Analysis Group on the MIT Media Lab. Initially managed by 15 completely different computer systems, Kismet employed 21 motors to create facial expressions and physique postures.

“I’ve a variety of affinity for that individual artifact,” says Nuñez, who studied with Breazeal on the Media Lab. “It’s such a charismatic object; it’s one of many museum’s Instagram moments.”

IRGO

Developed by Julie Shah ’04, SM ’06, PhD ’11, IRGO is an interactive robotic that museum guests will help to coach by means of artificial-intelligence demonstrations. “Our guests are collaborating in actual robotics analysis,” Nuñez says. “That’s such a uncommon and particular alternative.”

Right now Shah is the H.N. Slater Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and head of the Interactive Robotics Group throughout the Pc Science and Synthetic Intelligence Laboratory. She shares her ideas on AI in a close-by audio gallery. Different alumni featured in that gallery embrace Professor Rosalind Picard, SM ’86, ScD ’91, director of the Media Lab’s Affective Computing Analysis Group, and Media Lab PhD college students Matt Groh, SM ’19, and Pat Pataranutaporn, SM ’20.

“We wish to have the ability to expose the truth that there are communities of individuals behind all the pieces you’re seeing,” Nuñez says.

Coded gaze

Guests to the AI gallery can see the masks utilized by Pleasure Buolamwini, SM ’17, PhD ’22, to current a white face—moderately than her personal Black one—to facial recognition software program, which she discovered was much less correct for individuals with darkish pores and skin. In her doctoral thesis, Buolamwini coined the time period “coded gaze” to explain algorithmic bias.