Tag: MIT

New cloud gaming tech from MIT and Microsoft keeps movie and audio in sync

Laurent

Researchers have developed a new cloud gaming technique that takes advantage of lower-level white sounds to accurately synchronize separated audio and movie streams. The unique technique allow players see and listen to points at the ideal time, even with poor microphone good quality or in the presence of track record sound.

Cloud gaming actually took off when COVID-19 entered the globe stage, and lots of of us had been essential to stay residence. According to Statista, the quantity of world buyers in 2019 was 45.9 million so far, in 2023, people full 295 million.

In a typical cloud gaming set up, a server receives gaming inputs and audio chat streams from gaming add-ons these as controllers and headsets. In reaction, it concurrently generates two independent media streams for the participant. The initial is a video game-display screen stream comprising activity audio and online video intended for a display screen device this kind of as a Television set or tablet. The next is a game-accent stream intended for controllers and gaming audio headsets, comprising video game audio mixed with chat from fellow gamers and haptic suggestions these as controller vibrations.

These two streams are normally conveyed in excess of individual networks, which can lead to a deficiency of synchronization – inter-stream delay – between the two, ensuing in movie lag, a sluggish haptic response, and a bad gaming experience. Researchers from MIT teamed up with Microsoft Study to create Ekho, a technique that uses a exclusive system to deal with inter-stream delay. They’ll current a paper describing their method at the 2023 ACM Special Desire Group on Data Conversation (SIGCOMM) conference at Columbia University, New York Town, from the 10th to the 14th of September.

The scientists started by searching at the difficulty at the heart of inter-stream delay: clock synchronization.

“If the controller and the display could appear at their watches and at the exact same time see the same factor, then we could synchronize every thing to the clock,” said Pouya Hamadanian, guide author of the paper. “But a good deal of theoretical work on clock synchronization shows

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A wearable ultrasound scanner could detect breast most cancers before | MIT News

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When breast most cancers is diagnosed in the earliest stages, the survival price is virtually 100 percent. Nevertheless, for tumors detected in later on phases, that rate drops to all-around 25 percent.

In hopes of increasing the all round survival amount for breast cancer clients, MIT scientists have intended a wearable ultrasound machine that could permit folks to detect tumors when they are nevertheless in early phases. In certain, it could be useful for people at higher chance of producing breast cancer in among routine mammograms.

The device is a versatile patch that can be attached to a bra, letting the wearer to move an ultrasound tracker along the patch and graphic the breast tissue from distinctive angles. In the new study, the researchers confirmed that they could obtain ultrasound illustrations or photos with resolution equivalent to that of the ultrasound probes utilised in healthcare imaging centers.

“We changed the type issue of the ultrasound technological know-how so that it can be applied in your household. It’s moveable and effortless to use, and offers genuine-time, consumer-helpful checking of breast tissue,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in MIT’s Media Lab and the senior writer of the research.

MIT graduate college student Wenya Du, Research Scientist Lin Zhang, Emma Suh ’23, and Dabin Lin, a professor at Xi’an Technological University, are the guide authors of the paper, which appears now in Science Advancements.

A wearable diagnostic

For this project, Dagdeviren drew inspiration from her late aunt, Fatma Caliskanoglu, who was diagnosed with late-phase breast cancer at age 49, irrespective of possessing common cancer screens, and passed absent six months later on. At her aunt’s bedside, Dagdeviren, then a postdoc at MIT, drew up a tough schematic of a diagnostic gadget that could be incorporated into a bra and would let for a lot more regular screening of people today at higher hazard for breast most cancers. 

Breast tumors that build in amongst regularly scheduled mammograms — recognised as interval cancers — account for 20 to 30 per cent of all breast most cancers cases, and these tumors tend to

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Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so sturdy? | MIT News

Laurent

The historic Romans were being masters of engineering, setting up large networks of roadways, aqueducts, ports, and huge structures, whose continues to be have survived for two millennia. A lot of of these buildings had been designed with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s greatest unreinforced concrete dome and was focused in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some historical Roman aqueducts nevertheless supply h2o to Rome nowadays. Meanwhile, quite a few modern-day concrete buildings have crumbled just after a number of a long time.

Scientists have spent decades attempting to figure out the magic formula of this ultradurable historical construction substance, notably in structures that endured in particular severe situations, this sort of as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or all those constructed in seismically energetic destinations.

Now, a staff of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has produced progress in this discipline, finding historical concrete-producing tactics that integrated numerous essential self-healing functionalities. The findings are printed today in the journal Science Developments, in a paper by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, previous doctoral student Linda Seymour ’14, PhD ’21, and four other folks.

For a lot of a long time, researchers have assumed that the crucial to the historical concrete’s longevity was based mostly on one particular ingredient: pozzolanic material these kinds of as volcanic ash from the place of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This certain variety of ash was even transported all across the broad Roman empire to be utilized in building, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Underneath closer examination, these historic samples also incorporate compact, unique, millimeter-scale brilliant white mineral capabilities, which have been extensive acknowledged as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, normally referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another crucial ingredient of the historic concrete blend. “Ever because I very first began performing with ancient Roman concrete, I have constantly been fascinated by these attributes,” states Masic. “These are not discovered in modern

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MIT wins earth finals of the 45th Global Collegiate Programming Contest | MIT Information

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On Nov. 10, MIT’s crew of pupil coders built historical past by profitable the globe’s oldest, greatest, and most prestigious programming contest — the environment finals of the Global Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the 45th environment finals drew a live viewers of more than 1,600 viewers to the tense 12-challenge opposition, which showcased 420 contestants symbolizing 140 universities across 45 nations.

The very first ICPC Earth Finals was held in 1977, and the 2nd (in 1978) was gained by MIT — followed by numerous, numerous yrs of near misses for the group from Cambridge. Workforce college sponsor Martin Rinard, professor of pc science and engineering in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Personal computer Science (EECS) suggests that the staff has come close to profitable various instances considering that he took about leadership of the staff in 1997. That involves five gold medals, 5 silver medals, 3 bronze medals and two second-location finishes. But he considers this general performance significantly special.

Profitable the championship resulted from the perform of quite a few, together with Senior Administrative Assistant Mary McDavitt, who dealt with the daunting logistics concerned in sending a crew of undergraduates midway all-around the planet, as properly as scholar coaches Ce Jin and Yinzhan Xu, both equally PhD college students in EECS, who helped select the best staff to represent MIT. That staff is composed of Xiao Mao ’21 MEng ’22, who has degrees in each laptop or computer science and engineering and in mathematics Jerry Mao, a senior in pc science and engineering and Mingyang Deng, a junior in laptop or computer science and engineering. (Deng also recently competed in and gained the 2022 North American Championships of the ICPC, clinching eligibility to attend the 46th once-a-year ICPC Planet Finals subsequent 12 months.)

In this job interview, conducted via e-mail for the duration of and immediately after the flight back again from Bangladesh, the trio mirror on their historic victory.

Q: Initial off, congratulations! Convey to us how you got in the mental house to compete. What kinds of practices, rituals, and preparing

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Hunting outside of “technology for technology’s sake” | MIT News

Laurent

Austen Roberson’s preferred class at MIT is 2.S007 (Design and style and Production I-Autonomous Machines), in which students style and design, establish, and plan a absolutely autonomous robot to attain duties laid out on a themed match board.

“The ideal issue about that course is everybody experienced a various thought,” says Roberson. “We all had the exact same sport board and the exact recommendations provided to us, but the robots that arrived out of people’s minds were so different.”

The video game board was Mars-themed, with a design shuttle that could be lifted to score factors. Roberson’s robot, nicknamed Tank Evans immediately after a character from the movie “Surf’s Up,” employed a clever technique to attain this undertaking. Alternatively of spinning the gears that would raise the complete mechanism, Roberson realized a claw gripper could wrap close to the outdoors of the shuttle and carry it manually.

“That was not the meant way,” suggests Roberson, but his exterior-of-the-box approach ending up successful him the levels of competition at the conclusion of the course, which was element of the New Engineering Instruction Transformation (NEET) application. “It was a actually excellent course for me. I get a whole lot of gratification out of setting up some thing with my fingers and then applying my programming and issue-resolving capabilities to make it go.”

Roberson, a senior, is majoring in aerospace engineering with a slight in computer science. As his winning robotic demonstrates, he thrives at the intersection of both equally fields. He references the Mars Curiosity Rover as the type of project that inspires him he even keeps a Lego product of Curiosity on his desk. 

“You seriously have to rely on that the hardware you’ve designed is up to the job, but you also have to trust your software similarly as significantly,” states Roberson, referring to the troubles of running a rover from thousands and thousands of miles away. “Is the robotic likely to go on to operate after we have place it into space? Each of those people factors have to occur with each other in this kind of a excellent

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A more simple path to superior laptop vision | MIT Information

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Before a machine-understanding design can entire a activity, this kind of as figuring out most cancers in healthcare pictures, the model must be educated. Education impression classification styles commonly consists of demonstrating the design hundreds of thousands of instance photographs collected into a large dataset.

However, applying real image info can raise useful and ethical worries: The visuals could operate afoul of copyright legislation, violate people’s privacy, or be biased towards a selected racial or ethnic group. To stay clear of these pitfalls, researchers can use picture era applications to make synthetic data for design training. But these approaches are restricted for the reason that skilled awareness is generally wanted to hand-design and style an picture generation software that can produce successful instruction info. 

Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and somewhere else took a distinct tactic. Rather of developing tailored graphic generation plans for a distinct education activity, they collected a dataset of 21,000 publicly out there programs from the online. Then they utilised this big selection of essential image generation programs to teach a personal computer eyesight design.

These programs develop various illustrations or photos that display screen straightforward shades and textures. The researchers did not curate or change the systems, which each comprised just a handful of lines of code.

The versions they properly trained with this substantial dataset of packages labeled illustrations or photos a lot more accurately than other synthetically qualified products. And, when their types underperformed those trained with actual knowledge, the researchers confirmed that escalating the selection of image courses in the dataset also increased product efficiency, revealing a route to attaining greater precision.

“It turns out that applying tons of programs that are uncurated is actually superior than making use of a small set of plans that people today want to manipulate. Knowledge are crucial, but we have proven that you can go very considerably without the need of serious information,” suggests Manel Baradad, an electrical engineering and pc science (EECS) graduate scholar doing work in the Laptop Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and guide author of the paper

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