This semester, college students and postdocs throughout MIT had been invited to submit concepts for the first-ever MIT Ignite: Generative AI Entrepreneurship Competitors. 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 skilled judges and a packed room in Samberg Convention Heart.
“MIT has a duty to assist form a way forward for AI innovation that’s broadly useful — and to try this, we want lots of nice concepts. So, we turned to a fairly dependable supply of nice concepts: MIT’s extremely entrepreneurial college 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 give attention to 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 advantage of society. This occasion — co-organized by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the Martin Belief Heart for MIT Entrepreneurship, and supported by MIT’s College of Engineering and the MIT Sloan College of Administration — impressed younger researchers to contribute to the dialogue and innovate in generative AI.
Serving as co-chairs for the occasion had been Aude Oliva, MIT director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and a principal investigator within the Laptop Science and Synthetic Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Invoice Aulet, the Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Apply on the MIT Sloan College of Administration and director of the Martin Belief Heart; and Dina Katabi, the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor within the Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science, director of the Heart for Wi-fi Networks and Cell Computing, and a CSAIL principal investigator.
Twelve groups of scholars and postdocs had been competing for quite a few prizes, together with 5 MIT Ignite Flagship Prizes of $15,000 every, a particular first-year undergraduate scholar staff Flagship Prize, and runner-up prizes. All prizes had been offered by the MIT-IBM AI Watson Lab. Groups had been judged on their mission’s revolutionary purposes of generative AI, feasibility, potential for real-world impression, and the standard of presentation.
After the 12 groups showcased their expertise, its potential to handle a problem, and the staff’s means to execute the plan, a panel of judges deliberated. Because the viewers waited for the outcomes, remarks had been made by Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Company; Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT College of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science; and David Schmittlein, the John C. Head III Dean and professor of promoting on the MIT Sloan College of Administration. The coed winners included:
MIT Ignite Flagship Prizes
eMote (Philip Cherner, Julia Sebastien, Caroline Lige Zhang, and Daeun Yoo): Generally figuring out and expressing feelings is troublesome, notably for these on the alexithymia spectrum; additional, remedy may be costly. eMote’s app permits customers to establish their feelings, visualize them as artwork utilizing the co-creative means of generative AI, and mirror on them by means of journaling, thereby helping faculty counselors and therapists.
LeGT.ai (Julie Shi, Jessica Yuan, and Yubing Cui): Authorized processes round immigration may be difficult and expensive. LeGT.ai goals to democratize authorized information. Utilizing 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 corporations, in addition to enhance pre-screening and preliminary consultations.
Sunona (Emmi Mills, Selin Kocalar, Srihitha Dasari, and Karun Kaushik): About half of a physician’s day is consumed by medical documentation and medical notes. To handle this, Sunona harnesses audio transcription and a big language mannequin to remodel audio from a physician’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 harm, 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, good sensors, and a multimodal AI system (muscle EMG, pc imaginative and prescient, eye actions) educated on hundreds of actions to plan exact limb actions.
UrsaTech (Rui Zhou, Jerry Shan, Kate Wang, Alan He, and Rita Zhang): Training at the moment 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-12 months Undergraduate Pupil Staff 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 probably 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 sudden inputs to disclose software program vulnerabilities — could make software program considerably safer. Autonomous Cyber’s system leverages massive language fashions to mechanically combine “fuzzers” into databases.
Gen EGM (Noah Bagazinski and Kristen Edwards): Making knowledgeable socioeconomic growth insurance policies requires proof and knowledge. Gen EGM’s massive language mannequin system expedites the method by analyzing and analyzing literature, after which produces an proof hole map (EGM), suggesting potential impression areas.
Mattr AI (Leandra Tejedor, Katie Chen, and Eden Adler): Datasets which can be used to coach AI fashions typically have problems with variety, fairness, and completeness. Mattr AI addresses this with generative AI with a big language mannequin and steady diffusion fashions to enhance datasets.
Neuroscreen (Andrew Lu, Chonghua Xue, and Grant Robinson): Screening sufferers to probably be part of a dementia medical trial is expensive, typically takes years, and largely ends in an ineligibility. Neuroscreen employs AI to extra shortly assess sufferers’ dementia causes, resulting in extra profitable enrollment in medical trials and remedy of situations.
The Information 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, typically have lacking or incorrect metadata, inflicting concern for authorized and moral points. The Information Provenance Initiative makes use of AI-assisted annotation to audit datasets, monitoring the lineage and authorized standing of knowledge, enhancing knowledge transparency, legality, and moral issues round knowledge.
Theia (Jenny Yao, Hongze Bo, Jin Li, Ao Qu, and Hugo Huang): Scientific analysis, and on-line dialogue round it, typically happens in silos. Theia’s platform goals to deliver 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 neighborhood.
After the MIT Ignite competitors, all 12 groups chosen to current had been invited to a networking occasion as an instantaneous first step to creating their concepts and prototypes a actuality. Moreover, they had been invited to additional develop their concepts with the help of the Martin Belief Heart for MIT Entrepreneurship by means of StartMIT or MIT Fuse and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
“Within the months since I’ve arrived [at MIT], I’ve realized lots about how MIT of us take into consideration entrepreneurship and the way it’s actually constructed into the whole lot that everybody on the Institute does, from first-year college students to school to alumni — they’re actually motivated to get their concepts out into the world,” mentioned President Kornbluth. “Entrepreneurship is an important ingredient for our purpose of organizing for optimistic impression.”