In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficiency and organization are more crucial than ever. With teams often scattered across various locations and projects growing increasingly complex, the need for effective work management tools has never been greater. These tools not only streamline project management but also enhance…
Method rapidly verifies that a robot will avoid collisions
Before a robot can grab dishes off a shelf to set the table, it must ensure its gripper and arm won’t crash into anything and potentially shatter the fine china. As part of its motion planning process, a robot typically runs “safety check” algorithms that verify its trajectory is collision-free.
However, sometimes these algorithms generate false positives, claiming a trajectory is safe when the robot would actually collide with something. Other methods that can avoid false positives are typically too slow for robots in the real world.
Now, MIT researchers have developed a safety check technique which can prove with 100 percent accuracy that a robot’s trajectory will remain collision-free (assuming the model of the robot and environment is itself accurate). Their method, which is so precise it can discriminate between trajectories that differ by only millimeters, provides proof in only a few seconds.
But a user doesn’t need to take the researchers’ word for it — the mathematical proof generated by this technique can be checked quickly with relatively simple math.
The researchers accomplished this using a special algorithmic technique, called sum-of-squares programming, and adapted it to effectively solve the safety check problem. Using sum-of-squares programming enables their method to generalize to a wide range of complex motions.
This technique could be especially useful for robots that must move rapidly avoid collisions in spaces crowded with objects, such as food preparation robots in a commercial kitchen. It is also well-suited for situations where robot collisions could cause injuries, like home health robots that care for frail patients.
“With this work, we have shown that you can solve some challenging problems with conceptually simple tools. Sum-of-squares programming is a powerful algorithmic idea, and while it doesn’t solve every problem, if you are careful in how you apply it, you can solve some pretty nontrivial problems,” says Alexandre Amice, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this technique.
Amice is joined on the paper fellow EECS graduate student Peter Werner and senior author Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of EECS, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The work will be presented at the International Conference on Robots and Automation.
Certifying safety
Many existing methods that check whether a robot’s planned motion is collision-free do so by simulating the trajectory and checking every few seconds to see whether the robot hits anything. But these static safety checks can’t tell if the robot will collide with something in the intermediate seconds.
This might not be a problem for a robot wandering around an open space with few obstacles, but for robots performing intricate tasks in small spaces, a few seconds of motion can make an enormous difference.
Conceptually, one way to prove that a robot is not headed for a collision would be to hold up a piece of paper that separates the robot from any obstacles in the environment. Mathematically, this piece of paper is called a hyperplane. Many safety check algorithms work by generating this hyperplane at a single point in time. However, each time the robot moves, a new hyperplane needs to be recomputed to perform the safety check.
Instead, this new technique generates a hyperplane function that moves with the robot, so it can prove that an entire trajectory is collision-free rather than working one hyperplane at a time.
The researchers used sum-of-squares programming, an algorithmic toolbox that can effectively turn a static problem into a function. This function is an equation that describes where the hyperplane needs to be at each point in the planned trajectory so it remains collision-free.
Sum-of-squares can generalize the optimization program to find a family of collision-free hyperplanes. Often, sum-of-squares is considered a heavy optimization that is only suitable for offline use, but the researchers have shown that for this problem it is extremely efficient and accurate.
“The key here was figuring out how to apply sum-of-squares to our particular problem. The biggest challenge was coming up with the initial formulation. If I don’t want my robot to run into anything, what does that mean mathematically, and can the computer give me an answer?” Amice says.
In the end, like the name suggests, sum-of-squares produces a function that is the sum of several squared values. The function is always positive, since the square of any number is always a positive value.
Trust but verify
By double-checking that the hyperplane function contains squared values, a human can easily verify that the function is positive, which means the trajectory is collision-free, Amice explains.
While the method certifies with perfect accuracy, this assumes the user has an accurate model of the robot and environment; the mathematical certifier is only as good as the model.
“One really nice thing about this approach is that the proofs are really easy to interpret, so you don’t have to trust me that I coded it right because you can check it yourself,” he adds.
They tested their technique in simulation by certifying that complex motion plans for robots with one and two arms were collision-free. At its slowest, their method took just a few hundred milliseconds to generate a proof, making it much faster than some alternate techniques.
“This new result suggests a novel approach to certifying that a complex trajectory of a robot manipulator is collision free, elegantly harnessing tools from mathematical optimization, turned into surprisingly fast (and publicly available) software. While not yet providing a complete solution to fast trajectory planning in cluttered environments, this result opens the door to several intriguing directions of further research,” says Dan Halperin, a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University, who was not involved with this research.
While their approach is fast enough to be used as a final safety check in some real-world situations, it is still too slow to be implemented directly in a robot motion planning loop, where decisions need to be made in microseconds, Amice says.
The researchers plan to accelerate their process by ignoring situations that don’t require safety checks, like when the robot is far away from any objects it might collide with. They also want to experiment with specialized optimization solvers that could run faster.
“Robots often get into trouble by scraping obstacles due to poor approximations that are made when generating their routes. Amice, Werner, and Tedrake have come to the rescue with a powerful new algorithm to quickly ensure that robots never overstep their bounds, by carefully leveraging advanced methods from computational algebraic geometry,” adds Steven LaVelle, professor in the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Oulu in Finland, and who was not involved with this work.
This work was supported, in part, by Amazon and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
30+ Best InDesign Business Card Templates
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Deciphering the cellular mechanisms behind ALS
At a time in which scientific research is increasingly cross-disciplinary, Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, stands out as both a very early adopter of drawing from different scientific fields and a great advocate of the practice today.
When Fraenkel’s students find themselves at an impasse in their work, he suggests they approach their problem from a different angle or look for inspiration in a completely unrelated field.
“I think the thing that I always come back to is try going around it from the side,” Fraenkel says. “Everyone in the field is working in exactly the same way. Maybe you’ll come up with a solution by doing something different.”
Fraenkel’s work untangling the often-complicated mechanisms of disease to develop targeted therapies employs methods from the world of computer science, including algorithms that bring focus to processes most likely to be relevant. Using such methods, he has decoded fundamental aspects of Huntington’s disease and glioblastoma, and he and his collaborators are working to understand the mechanisms behind amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Very early on, Fraenkel was exposed to a merging of scientific disciplines. One of his teachers in high school, who was a student at Columbia University, started a program in which chemistry, physics, and biology were taught together. The teacher encouraged Fraenkel to visit a lab at Columbia run by Cyrus Levinthal, a physicist who taught one of the first biophysics classes at MIT. Fraenkel not only worked at the lab for a summer, he left high school (later earning an equivalency diploma) and started working at the lab full time and taking classes at Columbia.
“Here was a lab that was studying really important questions in biology, but the head of it had trained in physics,” Fraenkel says. “The idea that you could get really important insights by cross-fertilization, that’s something that I’ve always really appreciated. And now, we can see how this approach can impact how people are being treated for diseases or reveal really important fundamentals of science.”
Breaking barriers
At MIT, Fraenkel works in the Department of Biological Engineering and co-directs the Computational Systems Biology graduate program. For the study of ALS, he and his collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), including neurologist and neuroscientist Merit Cudkowicz, were recently awarded $1.25 million each from the nonprofit EverythingALS organization. The strategy behind the gift, Fraenkel says, is to encourage MIT and MGH to increase their collaboration, eventually enlisting other organizations as well, to form a hub for ALS research “to break down barriers in the field and really focus on the core problems.”
Fraenkel has been working with EverythingALS and their data scientists in collaboration with doctors James Berry of MGH and Lyle Ostrow of Temple University. He also works extensively with the nonprofit Answer ALS, a consortium of scientists studying the disease.
Fraenkel first got interested in ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases because traditional molecular biology research had not yielded effective therapies or, in the case of ALS, much insight into the disease’s causes.
“I was interested in places where the traditional approaches of molecular biology” — in which researchers hypothesize that a certain protein or gene or pathway is key to understanding a disease — “were not having a lot of luck or impact,” Fraenkel says. “Those are the places where if you come at it from another direction, the field could really advance.”
Fraenkel says that while traditional molecular biology has produced many valuable discoveries, it’s not very systematic. “If you start with the wrong hypothesis, you’re not going to get very far,” he says.
Systems biology, on the other hand, measures many cellular changes — including transcription of genes, protein-DNA interactions, of thousands of chemical compounds and of protein modifications — and can apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to those measurements to collectively identify the most important interactions.
“The goal of systems biology is to systematically measure as many cellular changes as possible, integrate this data, and let the data guide you to the most promising hypotheses,” Fraenkel says.
The Answer ALS project, with which Frankel works, involves approximately a thousand people with ALS who provided clinical information about their disease and blood cells. Their blood cells were reprogrammed to be pluripotent stem cells, meaning that the cells could be used to grow neurons that are studied and compared to neurons from a control group.
Emotional connection
While Fraenkel was intellectually inspired to apply systems biology to the challenging problem of understanding ALS — there is no known cause or cure for 80 to 90 percent of people with ALS — he also felt a strong emotional connection to the community of people with ALS and their advocates.
He tells a story of going to meet the director of an ALS organization in Israel who was trying to encourage scientists to work on the disease. Fraenkel knew the man had ALS. What he didn’t know before arriving at the meeting was that he was immobilized, lying in a hospital bed in his living room and only able to communicate with eye-blinking software.
“I sat down so we could both see the screen he was using to type characters out,” Fraenkel says, “and we had this fascinating conversation.”
“Here was a young guy in the prime of life, suffering in a way that’s unimaginable. At the same time, he was doing something amazing, running this organization to try to make a change. And he wasn’t the only one,” he says. “You meet one, and then another and then another — people who are sometimes on their last breaths and are still pushing to make a difference and cure the disease.”
The gift from EverythingALS — which was founded by Indu Navar after losing her husband, Peter Cohen, to ALS and later merged with CureALS, founded by Bill Nuti, who is living with ALS — aims to research the root causes of the disease, in the hope of finding therapies to stop its progression, and natural healing processes that could possibly restore function of damaged nerves.
To achieve those goals, Fraenkel says it is crucial to measure molecular changes in the cells of people with ALS and also to quantify the symptoms of ALS, which presents very differently from person to person. Fraenkel refers to how understanding the differences in various types of cancer has led to much better treatments, pointing out that ALS is nowhere near as well categorized or understood.
“The subtyping is really going to be what the field needs,” he says. “The prognosis for more than 80 percent of people with ALS is not appreciably different than it would have been 20, or maybe even 100, years ago.”
In the same way that Fraenkel was fascinated as a high school student by doing biology in a physicist’s lab, he says he loves that at MIT, different disciplines work together easily.
“You reach out to MIT colleagues in other departments, and they’re not surprised to hear from someone who’s not in their field,” Fraenkel says. “We’re a goal-oriented institution that focuses on solving hard problems.”
Supernatural Action Game Unknown 9: Awakening Reemerges With First Gameplay Trailer And Release Window
Unknown 9: Awakening has been silent since its reveal at Gamescom 2020, but today’s Xbox Partner Preview saw it reemerge with its first gameplay trailer and release window.
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The game is set within the popular sci-fi media franchise and is a third-person adventure starring Haroona (played by The Witcher‘s Anya Chalotra), a woman gifted with mysterious abilities. The game’s official website has the following synopsis:
You play as Haroona, a fierce truth-seeker (what we call a “Quaestor”) with a unique connection to another dimension known as the Fold. This other plane of existence contains powerful energy and long-lost knowledge that, if brought to light, could usher us into a wondrous era of advancement. However, if this forgotten wisdom falls into the wrong hands, it could lead to our inevitable demise.
Determined to avenge the wrongs of her past, Haroona’s imminent journey will turn out to involve far more than just retribution. Humanity’s fate is at risk, and her ties to the Fold may be the key to securing our continued existence.
This quest will have you uncover the long-lost secrets of our collective past. You’ll also learn to tap into the Fold’s energy, gifting you incredible skills, known as Umbric abilities, that allow you to take down anyone who stands in your way.
But beware of the Ascendants, a dangerous offshoot of a secret society known as the Leap Year Society. This faction claims to want to use the Fold for the betterment of humankind, but don’t be fooled. Even the best of intentions can lead to catastrophe.
That includes, from what we can tell, sucking people’s souls out of their bodies and telepathically blasting enemies through destructible environments. Haroona can also pull enemies, control their minds, and more. The game also features parkour-style platforming across an Indian city.
Unknown 9: Awakening is coming this summer to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Everything Announced At Today’s Xbox Partner Preview
Today’s Xbox Partner Preview showcased 14 games across 30 minutes, some brand new, some long lost, and others newly christened with release dates. Here’s a quick rundown of everything announced.
Unknown 9: Awakening – Summer 2024
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First announced at Gamescom 2020, this supernatural third-person action game showed its first signs of life in over three years with its first gameplay trailer. It stars Haroona, a woman gifted with supernatural powers used to battle enemies across an Indian city. You can learn more here.
Sleight of Hand – 2025
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This third-person, stealth-focused noir deckbuilder is directly inspired by Metal Gear Solid. You can learn more here.
The Alters – 2024
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We learned that 11bit Studios’ body-duplicating sci-fi adventure, in which a miner must survive a hostile planet by creating multiple versions of himself, is coming to Game Pass when it arrives this year. It also got its first gameplay trailer. You can learn more here.
Creatures of Ava – 2024
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Co-written by famed scribe Rhianna Pratchett, the lead writer behind Tomb Raider/Rise of the Tomb Raider, among other tiles, Creatures of Ava is an empathy-driven action-adventure game about taming and protecting creatures to rescue a planet from a life-threatening infection.
Roblox’s Griefville X Chucky Crossover – Available Now
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The typically kid-friendly Roblox gets a dedicatedly mature update in the form of the horror-themed Griefville. Kicking off this new location is the murderous arrival of Chucky.
The Sinking City 2 – 2025
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Frogwares’ The Sinking City gets an encore next year. The Lovecraftian survival horror game takes place in a twisted version of Arkham in 1920s America.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Legends of the Zone Trilogy – Available Now
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GSC Game World has remastered the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy for consoles. The collection includes Shadow of Chornobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Prypiat. You can learn more here.
Monster Jam: Showdown – 2024
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Monster truck fans have a new Monster Jam racing title to look forward to this year. Events include freestyle and off-road racing.
Persona 3 Reload Expansion Pass – 2024
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Although many of us are likely still getting through Persona 3 Reload, our stay has been extended thanks to an expansion pass. Released in three waves throughout the year, the pass adds the fan-favorite epilogue of Persona 3 FES, dubbed Episode Aigis – The Answer (in September) along with new background music sets and a Velvet costume. You can learn more here.
The First Berserker: Khazan
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The upcoming single-player action game set in the Dungeons and Fighters universe got another impressive gameplay showing. Unfortunately, it still has no release window.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau – April 23
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Ahead of its April 23 launch, Tales of Kenzera: Zau got an in-depth gameplay walkthrough showing off the side-scrolling action game’s mechanics.
Frostpunk 2 – July 25
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Frostpunk 2’s new trailer revealed the game is coming to PC Game Pass when it launches on July 25. The game is also coming to consoles (and Xbox Game Pass) at a later date.
Final Fantasy XIV For Xbox – March 21
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Final Fantasy XIV will fully launch on Xbox on March 21. The popular MMO is currently playable in beta on the platform, and the launch comes ahead of the summer release of the game’s next expansion, Dawntrail. You can learn more here.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess – 2024
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First announced last summer, this colorful Capcom title blends stylish swordplay with real-time strategy elements. You’ll battle supernatural monsters, rescue villagers, and use resources to fortify a village and defend it from invading beasts at nightfall. You can learn more here.
What was your favorite announcement from the Xbox Partner Preview? Let us know in the comments!
MIT scientists use a new type of nanoparticle to make vaccines more powerful
Many vaccines, including vaccines for hepatitis B and whooping cough, consist of fragments of viral or bacterial proteins. These vaccines often include other molecules called adjuvants, which help to boost the immune system’s response to the protein.
Most of these adjuvants consist of aluminum salts or other molecules that provoke a nonspecific immune response. A team of MIT researchers has now shown that a type of nanoparticle called a metal organic framework (MOF) can also provoke a strong immune response, by activating the innate immune system — the body’s first line of defense against any pathogen — through cell proteins called toll-like receptors.
In a study of mice, the researchers showed that this MOF could successfully encapsulate and deliver part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, while also acting as an adjuvant once the MOF is broken down inside cells.
While more work would be needed to adapt these particles for use as vaccines, the study demonstrates that this type of structure can be useful for generating a strong immune response, the researchers say.
“Understanding how the drug delivery vehicle can enhance an adjuvant immune response is something that could be very helpful in designing new vaccines,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and one of the senior authors of the new study.
Robert Langer, an MIT Institute Professor and member of the Koch Institute, and Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School, are also senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances. The paper’s lead author is former MIT postdoc and Ibn Khaldun Fellow Shahad Alsaiari.
Immune activation
In this study, the researchers focused on a MOF called ZIF-8, which consists of a lattice of tetrahedral units made up of a zinc ion attached to four molecules of imidazole, an organic compound. Previous work has shown that ZIF-8 can significantly boost immune responses, but it wasn’t known exactly how this particle activates the immune system.
To try to figure that out, the MIT team created an experimental vaccine consisting of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding protein (RBD) embedded within ZIF-8 particles. These particles are between 100 and 200 nanometers in diameter, a size that allows them to get into the body’s lymph nodes directly or through immune cells such as macrophages.
Once the particles enter the cells, the MOFs are broken down, releasing the viral proteins. The researchers found that the imidazole components then activate toll-like receptors (TLRs), which help to stimulate the innate immune response.
“This process is analogous to establishing a covert operative team at the molecular level to transport essential elements of the Covid-19 virus to the body’s immune system, where they can activate specific immune responses to boost vaccine efficacy,” Alsaiari says.
RNA sequencing of cells from the lymph nodes showed that mice vaccinated with ZIF-8 particles carrying the viral protein strongly activated a TLR pathway known as TLR-7, which led to greater production of cytokines and other molecules involved in inflammation.
Mice vaccinated with these particles generated a much stronger response to the viral protein than mice that received the protein on its own.
“Not only are we delivering the protein in a more controlled way through a nanoparticle, but the compositional structure of this particle is also acting as an adjuvant,” Jaklenec says. “We were able to achieve very specific responses to the Covid protein, and with a dose-sparing effect compared to using the protein by itself to vaccinate.”
Vaccine access
While this study and others have demonstrated ZIF-8’s immunogenic ability, more work needs to be done to evaluate the particles’ safety and potential to be scaled up for large-scale manufacturing. If ZIF-8 is not developed as a vaccine carrier, the findings from the study should help to guide researchers in developing similar nanoparticles that could be used to deliver subunit vaccines, Jaklenec says.
“Most subunit vaccines usually have two separate components: an antigen and an adjuvant,” Jaklenec says. “Designing new vaccines that utilize nanoparticles with specific chemical moieties which not only aid in antigen delivery but can also activate particular immune pathways have the potential to enhance vaccine potency.”
One advantage to developing a subunit vaccine for Covid-19 is that such vaccines are usually easier and cheaper to manufacture than mRNA vaccines, which could make it easier to distribute them around the world, the researchers say.
“Subunit vaccines have been around for a long time, and they tend to be cheaper to produce, so that opens up more access to vaccines, especially in times of pandemic,” Jaklenec says.
The research was funded by Ibn Khaldun Fellowships for Saudi Arabian Women and in part by the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
A noninvasive treatment for “chemo brain”
Patients undergoing chemotherapy often experience cognitive effects such as memory impairment and difficulty concentrating — a condition commonly known as “chemo brain.”
MIT researchers have now shown that a noninvasive treatment that stimulates gamma frequency brain waves may hold promise for treating chemo brain. In a study of mice, they found that daily exposure to light and sound with a frequency of 40 hertz protected brain cells from chemotherapy-induced damage. The treatment also helped to prevent memory loss and impairment of other cognitive functions.
This treatment, which was originally developed as a way to treat Alzheimer’s disease, appears to have widespread effects that could help with a variety of neurological disorders, the researchers say.
“The treatment can reduce DNA damage, reduce inflammation, and increase the number of oligodendrocytes, which are the cells that produce myelin surrounding the axons,” says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Picower Professor in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “We also found that this treatment improved learning and memory, and enhanced executive function in the animals.”
Tsai is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine. The paper’s lead author is TaeHyun Kim, an MIT postdoc.
Protective brain waves
Several years ago, Tsai and her colleagues began exploring the use of light flickering at 40 hertz (cycles per second) as a way to improve the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Previous work had suggested that Alzheimer’s patients have impaired gamma oscillations — brain waves that range from 25 to 80 hertz (cycles per second) and are believed to contribute to brain functions such as attention, perception, and memory.
Tsai’s studies in mice have found that exposure to light flickering at 40 hertz or sounds with a pitch of 40 hertz can stimulate gamma waves in the brain, which has many protective effects, including preventing the formation of amyloid beta plaques. Using light and sound together provides even more significant protection. The treatment also appears promising in humans: Phase 1 clinical trials in people with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease have found the treatment is safe and does offer some neurological and behavioral benefits.
In the new study, the researchers set out to see whether this treatment could also counteract the cognitive effects of chemotherapy treatment. Research has shown that these drugs can induce inflammation in the brain, as well as other detrimental effects such as loss of white matter — the networks of nerve fibers that help different parts of the brain communicate with each other. Chemotherapy drugs also promote loss of myelin, the protective fatty coating that allows neurons to propagate electrical signals. Many of these effects are also seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.
“Chemo brain caught our attention because it is extremely common, and there is quite a lot of research on what the brain is like following chemotherapy treatment,” Tsai says. “From our previous work, we know that this gamma sensory stimulation has anti-inflammatory effects, so we decided to use the chemo brain model to test whether sensory gamma stimulation can be beneficial.”
As an experimental model, the researchers used mice that were given cisplatin, a chemotherapy drug often used to treat testicular, ovarian, and other cancers. The mice were given cisplatin for five days, then taken off of it for five days, then on again for five days. One group received chemotherapy only, while another group was also given 40-hertz light and sound therapy every day.
After three weeks, mice that received cisplatin but not gamma therapy showed many of the expected effects of chemotherapy: brain volume shrinkage, DNA damage, demyelination, and inflammation. These mice also had reduced populations of oligodendrocytes, the brain cells responsible for producing myelin.
However, mice that received gamma therapy along with cisplatin treatment showed significant reductions in all of those symptoms. The gamma therapy also had beneficial effects on behavior: Mice that received the therapy performed much better on tests designed to measure memory and executive function.
“A fundamental mechanism”
Using single-cell RNA sequencing, the researchers analyzed the gene expression changes that occurred in mice that received the gamma treatment. They found that in those mice, inflammation-linked genes and genes that trigger cell death were suppressed, especially in oligodendrocytes, the cells responsible for producing myelin.
In mice that received gamma treatment along with cisplatin, some of the beneficial effects could still be seen up to four months later. However, the gamma treatment was much less effective if it was started three months after the chemotherapy ended.
The researchers also showed that the gamma treatment improved the signs of chemo brain in mice that received a different chemotherapy drug, methotrexate, which is used to treat breast, lung, and other types of cancer.
“I think this is a very fundamental mechanism to improve myelination and to promote the integrity of oligodendrocytes. It seems that it’s not specific to the agent that induces demyelination, be it chemotherapy or another source of demyelination,” Tsai says.
Because of its widespread effects, Tsai’s lab is also testing gamma treatment in mouse models of other neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Cognito Therapeutics, a company founded by Tsai and MIT Professor Edward Boyden, has finished a phase 2 trial of gamma therapy in Alzheimer’s patients, and plans to begin a phase 3 trial this year.
“My lab’s major focus now, in terms of clinical application, is Alzheimer’s; but hopefully we can test this approach for a few other indications, too,” Tsai says.
The research was funded by the JPB Foundation, the Ko Hahn Seed Fund, and the National Institutes of Health.
Do text embeddings perfectly encode text?
‘Vec2text’ can serve as a solution for accurately reverting embeddings back into text, thus highlighting the urgent need for revisiting security protocols around embedded data….