MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

CSAIL is the largest research laboratory at MIT and one of the world’s most important centers of information technology research.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: A system designed to recognize specific scenes, which is a key ingredient in making computers smarter, turned out to also be able to identify objects as an unintended side effect. When humans look at a picture, they automatically make a general judgement call about what’s going on in the scene – they intuit setting and context, essentially. This is a crucial skill that current computer vision and machine learning systems have a lot of trouble with, which can hinder the ability of intelligent systems designed to take on tasks like, say, driving or delivering packages. MIT researchers embarked on tackling scene identification, improving the performance of previous attempts by as much as 33 percent.