Category Physics

AI discovers that Not Every Fingerprint is Unique

AI discovers that not every fingerprint is unique
Saliency map highlights areas that contribute to the similarity between the two fingerprints from the same person. Credit: Gabe Guo,/Columbia Engineering

From “Law and Order” to “CSI,” not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.

It’s a well-accepted fact in the forensics community that fingerprints of different fingers of the same person—”intra-person fingerprints”—are unique and, therefore, unmatchable.

A team led by Columbia Engineering undergraduate senior Gabe Guo challenged this widely held presumption...

Read More

New Study uses Machine Learning to Bridge the Reality Gap in Quantum Devices

New study uses machine learning to bridge the reality gap in quantum devices
(a) Device geometry including the gate electrodes (labeled G1–G8), donor ion plane, and an example disorder potential experienced by confined electrons. Typical flow of current from source to drain is indicated by the white arrow. (b) Schematic of the disorder inference process. Colors indicate the following: red for experimentally controllable variables, green for quantities relevant to the electrostatic model, blue for experimental device, and yellow for machine learning methods. Dashed arrows represent the process of generating training data for the deep learning approximation and are not part of the disorder inference process. Credit: Physical Review X (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.14.011001

A study led by the University of Oxford has used the power of machine learning to ove...

Read More

Multiple AI Models Help Robots Execute Complex Plans more Transparently

Multiple AI models help robots execute complex plans more transparently
The HiP framework developed at MIT CSAIL develops detailed plans for robots using the expertise of three different foundation models, helping it execute tasks in households, factories, and construction that require multiple steps. Credit: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL

Your daily to-do list is likely pretty straightforward: wash the dishes, buy groceries, and other minutiae. It’s unlikely you wrote out “pick up the first dirty dish,” or “wash that plate with a sponge,” because each of these miniature steps within the chore feels intuitive. While we can routinely complete each step without much thought, a robot requires a complex plan that involves more detailed outlines.

MIT’s Improbable AI Lab, a group within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has offered t...

Read More

A Butterfly-Inspired Design to Create Crumple-Recoverable Electronics

A butterfly-inspired design to create crumple-recoverable electronics
Credit: Roh et al, Nature Electronics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-023-01089-6

Over the past decades, electronics engineers have created devices of various shapes and with increasingly sophisticated designs. This includes electronics that can be folded onto themselves, such as foldable phones, along with various other compressible devices.

Researchers at Ajou University and other institutes in South Korea recently introduced a new design for developing crumple-recoverable electronics, or in other words, electronics that can recover their original shape after being crumpled or compressed onto themselves to reduce their size...

Read More