Harvard University
US research university in Cambridge, MA. Early hub of AI research and home to labs contributing to machine learning and computational linguistics.
4 milestones
MIT Researchers Use Machine Learning to Identify Halicin, an Antibiotic Effective Against Drug-Resistant Bacteria
On 20 February 2020, James Collins and colleagues at MIT published research in Cell describing a deep-learning model trained to predict antibiotic activity; the model identified halicin, a compound previously investigated for diabetes treatment, as a potent broad-spectrum antibiotic capable of killing several drug-resistant bacterial strains.
Octobot: First Autonomous Soft Robot Using Microfluidic Logic
On 24 August 2016, researchers at Harvard University published the design of Octobot, the first autonomous, entirely soft robot. Powered by a chemical reaction and controlled by microfluidic logic, it required no electronics, batteries, or rigid components.
Augmented Transition Networks Introduced by William A. Woods
In 1970, William A. Woods of Bolt Beranek and Newman published 'Transition Network Grammars for Natural Language Analysis' in Communications of the ACM, introducing Augmented Transition Networks (ATNs) as a formalism for parsing natural language by extending finite-state transition networks with recursion and registers, enabling more expressive grammatical coverage.
Backpropagation Described by Arthur E. Bryson Jr. and Yu-Chi Ho
In 1969, Arthur E. Bryson Jr. and Yu-Chi Ho of Harvard University described a gradient-based optimisation procedure for multi-stage dynamic systems in their textbook Applied Optimal Control, presenting what is now recognised as an early statement of the backpropagation principle in a supervised-learning context.