Our Blog

Our thoughts are our experience in this world, and our worries, memories, and plans are the only real testimony to our existence. Moment by moment, it feels like we are thinking about what’s naturally important, but in reality we each focus only on a minuscule subset. Equally surprising is that we dwell on different subsets ...

Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) 2020 doesn’t just feel real; it almost is real. You see the same objects and relationships when you look out the window that you would see out of a physical plane. Down there are your own cities and streets, and you can even fly into a live hurricane [1]. Because of ...

Dr. Mugan talks about what it will take to build real AI. You can listen to the interview here https://brainsbehind.ai/1-deumbra-jonathan-mugan-on-developing-robots-who-understand-our-world-the-way-human-children-do/.

Computers are illiterate. Reading requires mapping the words on a page to shared concepts in our culture and commonsense understanding, and writing requires mapping those shared concepts into other words on a page. We currently don’t know how to endow computers with a conceptual system rich enough to represent even what a small child knows, ...

President Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for people under the age of 50, with opioids accounting for most of the devastation. Can data science help? Data can provide hints about underlying truths, but it is not immediately clear how it can be applied ...

As a mathematician and Ph.D., my work involves projects for the Department of Defense. The work is rewarding and interesting, and provides variety each day. As a bonus I also get to mentor upcoming graduates who are fresh with excitement about their field of interest, and are evaluating all the opportunities before them with eager ...

We want to know the present so that we can predict the future. When the ability to predict exceeds inferences that can be made with commonly accessible information, we call it precognition. The idea of precognition was made salient by the 2002 movie Minority Report. In that movie, there is a scene where one of ...

Cyber systems need intelligent defenses, and they are currently lacking. We have rote rules that specify how to protect our systems, but these rules can only protect against known attacks. We have methods for looking for unusual events, but these methods lack context and flag too many innocuous events as threatening. We even have machine ...

For the past six years I’ve been building programs that discover networks from various types of data. Why? Because as Laura said last week, what we do has had immediate applicability in helping our country solve incredibly hard and critical problems. But one may still wonder, why is the ability to discover networks amongst data ...