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The latest episode of Why Not Change the World? The RPI Podcast features researchers who have come up with new ways of looking at — and improving — things that have been around for a long time.

Numeric anchoring is a long-established technique of marketing communication. Once a price is mentioned, that number serves as the basis for — or “anchors” — all future discussions and decisions. But new research shows that this phenomenon is not limited to decisions that involve numbers, the use and understanding of which require high-level cognitive thinking. Anchoring also biases judgments at relatively low levels of cognition when no numbers are involved.

With a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant, researcher Kevin Rose will examine large-scale patterns in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and dissolved oxygen .

Future roads will likely carry autonomous vehicles that communicate with one another in a system where vehicles relay information — like destination, speed, or upcoming lane change — and then receive real-time feedback about decisions like route changes necessary to avoid traffic. Such an intelligent connected vehicle system could vastly improve mobility and safety, while reducing congestion and emissions from vehicles idling in traffic, but it will also add significant complexity to already dynamic traffic patterns, making vehicle flow vulnerable to instability.

An autonomous robot capable of seeking out, capturing, and killing the virus that causes COVID-19 is being developed and built by a multi-institutional team of students and researchers from across the nation – including a group of engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The 2020 Don Shohfi Memorial Outstanding Doctoral Paper Award was recently presented to Joonhyuk Bok, a doctoral student in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Why Not Change the World? The RPI Podcast kicks off its fourth season with an episode focused on promising research projects aimed at stopping SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from spreading and infecting humans.

The fourth season of Why Not Change the World? The RPI Podcast launched today with an episode focused on research efforts to stop SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from spreading and infecting humans. Each episode of Why Not Change the World? brings together multiple experts from different backgrounds to explore big ideas and pressing global challenges. In this way, the podcast highlights the interdisciplinary model for research and education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

About 13 years after it was first published, a book co-authored by Nancy Campbell, the head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, exploring a complex chapter in the nation’s history of drug addiction and treatment will be republished on March 16, 2021.

The original goal of human-like artificial intelligence was abandoned decades ago in favor of less ambitious approaches, two cognitive scientists argue in a new book. If that initial vision is to be realized, they say, AI systems will require a full understanding of language and meaning, the development of which remains a daunting — but doable — challenge. In Linguistics for the Age of AI, published by MIT Press, co-authors Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg, both faculty in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-directors of the Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents Lab, present a novel approach to language processing for AI systems.