
Chuchu Fan

New prediction model could improve the reliability of fusion power plants
Tokamaks are machines that are meant to hold and harness the power of the sun. These fusion machines use powerful magnets to contain a plasma hotter than the sun’s core and push the plasma’s atoms to fuse and release energy. If tokamaks can operate safely and efficiently, the machines could one day provide clean and…

This “smart coach” helps LLMs switch between text and code
Large language models (LLMs) excel at using textual reasoning to understand the context of a document and provide a logical answer about its contents. But these same LLMs often struggle to correctly answer even the simplest math problems. Textual reasoning is usually a less-than-ideal way to deliberate over computational or algorithmic tasks. While some LLMs…

Inroads to personalized AI trip planning
Travel agents help to provide end-to-end logistics — like transportation, accommodations, meals, and lodging — for businesspeople, vacationers, and everyone in between. For those looking to make their own arrangements, large language models (LLMs) seem like they would be a strong tool to employ for this task because of their ability to iteratively interact using…

Learning how to predict rare kinds of failures
On Dec. 21, 2022, just as peak holiday season travel was getting underway, Southwest Airlines went through a cascading series of failures in their scheduling, initially triggered by severe winter weather in the Denver area. But the problems spread through their network, and over the course of the next 10 days the crisis ended up…

Researchers teach LLMs to solve complex planning challenges
Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place….