Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Merging AI and underwater photography to reveal hidden ocean worlds
In the Northeastern United States, the Gulf of Maine represents one of the most biologically diverse marine ecosystems on the planet — home to whales, sharks, jellyfish, herring, plankton, and hundreds of other species. But even as this ecosystem supports rich biodiversity, it is undergoing rapid environmental change. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster…
Getting Started with Microsoft’s Presidio: A Step-by-Step Guide to Detecting and Anonymizing Personally Identifiable Information PII in Text
In this tutorial, we will explore how to use Microsoft’s Presidio, an open-source framework designed for detecting, analyzing, and anonymizing personally identifiable information (PII) in free-form text. Built on top of the efficient spaCy NLP library, Presidio is both lightweight and modular, making it easy to integrate into real-time applications and pipelines. We will cover…
LLMs factor in unrelated information when recommending medical treatments
A large language model (LLM) deployed to make treatment recommendations can be tripped up by nonclinical information in patient messages, like typos, extra white space, missing gender markers, or the use of uncertain, dramatic, and informal language, according to a study by MIT researchers. They found that making stylistic or grammatical changes to messages increases…
Teaching Mistral Agents to Say No: Content Moderation from Prompt to Response
In this tutorial, we’ll implement content moderation guardrails for Mistral agents to ensure safe and policy-compliant interactions. By using Mistral’s moderation APIs, we’ll validate both the user input and the agent’s response against categories like financial advice, self-harm, PII, and more. This helps prevent harmful or inappropriate content from being generated or processed — a…
Celebrating an academic-industry collaboration to advance vehicle technology
On May 6, MIT AgeLab’s Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium, part of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, celebrated 10 years of its global academic-industry collaboration. AVT was founded with the aim of developing new data that contribute to automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and insurers’ real-world understanding of how drivers use and respond to increasingly…
Building Event-Driven AI Agents with UAgents and Google Gemini: A Modular Python Implementation Guide
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use the UAgents framework to build a lightweight, event-driven AI agent architecture on top of Google’s Gemini API. We’ll start by applying nest_asyncio to enable nested event loops, then configure your Gemini API key and instantiate the GenAI client. Next, we’ll define our communication contracts, Question and Answer…
Unpacking the bias of large language models
Research has shown that large language models (LLMs) tend to overemphasize information at the beginning and end of a document or conversation, while neglecting the middle. This “position bias” means that, if a lawyer is using an LLM-powered virtual assistant to retrieve a certain phrase in a 30-page affidavit, the LLM is more likely to…
Build an Intelligent Multi-Tool AI Agent Interface Using Streamlit for Seamless Real-Time Interaction
In this tutorial, we’ll build a powerful and interactive Streamlit application that brings together the capabilities of LangChain, the Google Gemini API, and a suite of advanced tools to create a smart AI assistant. Using Streamlit’s intuitive interface, we’ll create a chat-based system that can search the web, fetch Wikipedia content, perform calculations, remember key…
A sounding board for strengthening the student experience
During his first year at MIT in 2021, Matthew Caren ’25 received an intriguing email inviting students to apply to become members of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s (SCC) Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG). He immediately shot off an application. Caren is a jazz musician who majored in computer science and engineering, and minored in music…
How to Build an Advanced BrightData Web Scraper with Google Gemini for AI-Powered Data Extraction
In this tutorial, we walk you through building an enhanced web scraping tool that leverages BrightData’s powerful proxy network alongside Google’s Gemini API for intelligent data extraction. You’ll see how to structure your Python project, install and import the necessary libraries, and encapsulate scraping logic within a clean, reusable BrightDataScraper class. Whether you’re targeting Amazon…