- Multicore chips that are smarter, better & fasterFebruary 18, 2015Computer chips’ clocks have stopped getting faster. To keep delivering performance improvements, chipmakers are instead giving chips more processing units, or cores, which can execute computations in parallel. But the ways in which a chip carves up computations can make a big difference to...
- Mapping the human epigenomeFebruary 18, 2015The sequencing of the human genome laid the foundation for the study of genetic variation and its links to a wide range of diseases. But the genome itself is only part of the story, as genes can be switched on and off by a range of chemical modifications, known as “epigenetic marks.” Now, a decade...
- Can an LED-filled “robot garden” make coding more accessible?February 18, 2015Here’s one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim, and blossom like flowers. A team from CSAIL and the Department of Mechanical Engineering have developed a tablet-operated...
- How to create better how-to videos, using computer scienceFebruary 11, 2015Educational researchers have long held that presenting students with clear outlines of the material covered in lectures improves their retention. Recent studies indicate that the same is true of online how-to videos, and in a new paper researchers at CSAIL and Harvard University describe a new...
- Balakrishnan, Rus elected to National Academy of EngineeringFebruary 05, 2015CSAIL principal investigators Hari Balakrishnan and Daniela Rus were among the 67 new members and 12 foreign associates elected today to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to American engineers. Academy...
- 2 new principal investigators to add to lab's machine-learning expertiseFebruary 02, 2015This year CSAIL welcomes new principal investigators Tamara Broderick and Stefanie Jegelka, who have both joined MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) as assistant professors. Broderick and Jegelka were both most recently at the University of California, Berkeley,...
- Revamped "data structure" helps multicore chips maintain performanceJanuary 30, 2015Every undergraduate computer-science major takes a course on data structures, which describes different ways of organizing data in a computer’s memory. Every data structure has its own advantages: Some are good for fast retrieval, some for efficient search, some for quick insertions and deletions,...
- Silvio Micali named associate department head of EECSJanuary 23, 2015Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) head Anantha Chandrakasan has announced the appointment of Professor Silvio Micali as associate department head of EECS, effective Jan. 15. Micali succeeds Professor Bill Freeman, who served in this role and as a member of the...
- An algorithm that improves pattern recognitionJanuary 21, 2015Optimization algorithms, which try to find the minimum values of mathematical functions, are everywhere in engineering. Among other things, they’re used to evaluate design tradeoffs, to assess control systems, and to find patterns in data. One way to solve a difficult optimization problem is to...
- Our Atlas robot is back!January 21, 2015This week DARPA unveiled the new and improved Atlas robot that CSAIL's team will be using at this June's DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). The DRC is an international competition in which research teams from academy and industry are trying to develop a fully-autonomous robot...
- A better Siri? Planning software evaluates success probabilitiesJanuary 16, 2015Imagine that you could tell your phone that you want to drive from your house in Boston to a hotel in upstate New York, that you want to stop for lunch at an Applebee’s at about 12:30, and that you don’t want the trip to take more than four hours. Then imagine that your phone tells you that you...
- GPS-less drones? CSAIL spin-off Skydio uses complex computer vision systemsJanuary 16, 2015A new start-up called Skydio, co-founded by two former CSAIL researchers, just emerged from a year in stealth mode to receive $3 million in funding for its GPS-less drones that employ sophisticated computer vision algorithms. Read more in The Verge, and check out videos from the team's work in...
Obama, UK PM Cameron announce CSAIL cybersecurity competitionJanuary 16, 2015As part of a series of cybersecurity initiatives made public today during British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit with President Barack Obama, the two nations announced that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will face off against the University of Cambridge...
Learn about Big Data online! Enroll now in CSAIL-taught course with MIT Professional EducationJanuary 13, 2015Sign Up Now for Spring Session of "Tackling the Challenges of Big Data"Starting February 3 MIT Professional Education will be offering a new installment of the online professional course, "Tackling the Challenges of Big Data". Twelve faculty experts from CSAIL will lead the course with enhanced...- Want a personal robot? This new object-recognition algorithm could helpJanuary 12, 2015For household robots ever to be practical, they’ll need to be able to recognize the objects they’re supposed to manipulate. But while object recognition is one of the most widely studied topics in artificial intelligence, even the best object detectors still fail much of the time. CSAIL ...
- 5 CSAIL PIs named 2014 ACM fellows - more than any other institutionJanuary 08, 2015Today the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) announced its 2014 fellows, and among the awardees were five researchers from CSAIL — more than any other academic institution in the world. Srini Devadas, Eric Grimson, Robert Morris, Ronitt Rubinfeld, and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus were among...
- Two CSAIL researchers make Forbes' "30 under 30" listJanuary 05, 2015Two CSAIL researchers were named to Forbes magazine's fourth-annual "30 under 30" list, which honors today's "greatest gathering of young game changers, movers and makers." Graduate student Fadel Adib was recognized for his contributions in Dina Katabi's Networks@MIT group that...
- 8 of the coolest things that happened at CSAIL this yearDecember 29, 2014It’s been a busy year for CSAIL. Researchers celebrated the lab’s 50th anniversary, created groundbreaking algorithms to magnify video and predict Bitcoin prices, and developed exciting new robots that can walk, talk, fly and swim. As 2014 comes to a close, we thought we’d look back on a few...
- Arvind elected as India National Academy of Sciences Foreign FellowDecember 23, 2014CSAIL researcher Arvind has been elected as Foreign Fellow to the India National Academy of Sciences. The Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Professor in Computer Science, Arvind has contributed to the development of dynamic dataflow architectures, the implicitly-parallel programming...
- Taking the grunt work out of Web developmentDecember 23, 2014A Web page today is the result of a number of interacting components — like cascading style sheets, XML code, ad hoc database queries, and JavaScript functions. For all but the most rudimentary sites, keeping track of how these different elements interact, refer to each other, and pass data back...
- Could birdsong help us solve stuttering?December 22, 2014Think that sparrow whistling outside your bedroom window is nothing more than pleasant background noise? A new paper from a CSAIL researcher suggests that we can apply what we know about songbirds to our understanding of human speech production — and, therefore, come closer to...
- CSAIL PhDs' discuss gender in STEMs on Wired & RedditDecember 19, 2014As part of CSAIL's "Hour of Code" efforts this past week, on three CSAIL PhD students (Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang) participated in an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session on Reddit, where they answered questions about CSAIL, programming, academia and what it's like to be women in...
- More-flexible digital communicationDecember 12, 2014Communication protocols for digital devices are very efficient but also very brittle: They require information to be specified in a precise order with a precise number of bits. If sender and receiver — say, a computer and a printer — are off by even a single bit relative to each other,...
CSAIL opens lab to 150 local students for "Hour of Code"December 12, 2014Yesterday CSAIL hosted 150 local students for its first annual “Hour of Code” demo fair, tied to the international initiative aimed at getting young people excited about programming. Researchers showed off their work to math and computer science students from schools throughout greater Boston,...- MIT's new "Solve" event focused on future of technology to be curated by Agarwal & BrooksDecember 12, 2014MIT will convene technologists, philanthropists, business leaders, policymakers, and social-change agents Oct. 5-8, 2015, for the launch of “Solve,” an effort to galvanize these leaders to drive progress on complex, important global challenges that MIT has singled out as urgent and ripe for...
- Computers that teach by exampleDecember 05, 2014Computers are good at identifying patterns in huge data sets. Humans, by contrast, are good at inferring patterns from just a few examples. In a paper appearing at the Neural Information Processing Society’s conference next week, CSAIL researchers present a new system that bridges these two...
- Can Facebook spot terrorist behavior online? Daniel Weitzner discusses in the GuardianDecember 05, 2014The UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee recently suggested that Facebook and other internet platforms “take responsibility” for detecting terrorist activity online, in much the way that search engines can find child abuse images. But in the Guardian, CSAIL researcher Daniel...
- Reinventing the Internet to make it saferDecember 03, 2014CSAIL cybersecurity expert Howard Shrobe was prominently featured in the New York Times' special "Security" section this week. From "Reinventing the Internet to Make it Safer": With the advent of cloud computing and shiny new phones, tablets and watches, it can be easy to forget that in...
- Stata: one of 10 reasons "why MIT is beautiful" this fallDecember 01, 2014The Stata Center made the cut for MIT Admissions' list of "10 Reasons Why MIT is beautiful." Check out some of the other majestic campus shots taken this fall: http://bit.ly/1z9lp9P
- New AI start-up Sentient collaborated with CSAIL on medical data analysisNovember 30, 2014This past week the AI company Sentient Technologies LLC emerged with $103.5 million in new funding. CSAIL researchers that include Una-May O'Reilly have been part of regular collaborations with Sentient on medical-data analysis work related to sepsis, a form of inflammation brought...
- Shafi Goldwasser joins Lab for Nuclear Security and PolicyNovember 26, 2014CSAIL researcher Shafi Goldwasser recently joined the team at The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering's Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy (LNSP), which just received $3.2 million from the National Nuclear Security Administration to support research that could revolutionize...
- TOC researcher earns 2014 Infosys Prize for Mathematical SciencesNovember 24, 2014It was recently announced that Madhu Sudan, an MIT adjunct professor and member of CSAIL's Theory of Computation, has been selected to receive the 2014 Infosys Prize for Mathematical Sciences. Presented by the Infosys Science Foundation in India, the award is given annually to honor...
- New $15m MIT initiative on cybersecurity policy headed by CSAIL's WeitznerNovember 18, 2014MIT has received $15 million in funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to establish an initiative aimed at laying the foundations for a smart, sustainable cybersecurity policy to deal with the growing cyber threats faced by governments, businesses, and individuals. The MIT...
New $15m MIT initiative on cybersecurity policy headed by CSAIL's WeitznerNovember 18, 2014MIT has received $15 million in funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to establish an initiative aimed at laying the foundations for a smart, sustainable cybersecurity policy to deal with the growing cyber threats faced by governments, businesses, and individuals. The MIT...- Are Netflix & Amazon recommending things right?November 17, 2014CSAIL principal investigator Devavrat Shah’s group specializes in analyzing how social networks process information. In 2012, the group demonstrated algorithms that could predict what topics would trend on Twitter up to five hours in advance; this year, they used the same framework to predict...
- VIDEO: How the Digi-Comp II worksNovember 15, 2014Tired of explaining how that big, wooden contraption in Stata works? Check out this video demo of the Digi-Comp II, courtesy of "MIT+k12 videos.
- Could tomorrow's clothes morph in response to weather?November 11, 2014This week Wired profiled Skylar Tibbits at MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, which is aimed at developing unique new materials that can self-assemble into useful objects like furniture or clothing. Tibbits' work with CSAIL principal investigator Erik Demaine include clothing that would be able to...
- Former CSAIL director's fear: not enough robotsNovember 05, 2014Former CSAIL director Rodney Brooks recently talks about his biggest fear: not enough robots in the world. From this month's issue of Boston Magazine:
- What are the building blocks of human imagination?November 03, 2014From MIT Technology Review: Here’s a curious experiment. Take some white noise and use it to produce a set of images that are essentially random arrangements of different coloured blocks. Show these images to a number of people and ask whether any of the images remind them of, say, a car....
CSAIL team helps MIT win international RobotX self-driving boat competitionNovember 01, 2014This week a team featuring multiple Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers took home the grand prize in an international competition centered on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Members of CSAIL’s Marine Robotics Group joined forces with more than 20...- CSAIL team helps MIT win international RobotX self-driving boat competitionOctober 30, 2014This week a team featuring multiple CSAIL researchers took home the grand prize in an international competition centered on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Members of CSAIL’s Marine Robotics Group joined forces with more than 20 other researchers from MIT and Olin College as one of 15...
- Historic quantum software is run for the first timeOctober 24, 2014This week marks the first instance of software demonstrating the potential of quantum computing being run on a real machine - 20 years after the piece of software was first created. South African researchers used a one-way quantum computer to run an algorithm developed in 1994 by University of...
- Meet the woman who's helped thousands of MIT's brightest snag jobsOctober 22, 2014This week the Boston Globe's biz-tech site profiled an EECS administrator's whose infamous "Anne Hunter list" has helped thousands of MIT students and researchers get jobs over the last 20 years. Read more at BetaBoston: http://bit.ly/1rqBzpy
- Researchers predict price of Bitcoin via deep learningOctober 21, 2014Scientists have crunched data to predict crime, hospital visits, and government uprisings — so why not the price of Bitcoin? A researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory recently developed a machine-learning algorithm that can predict the price of the infamously...
- Daniela Rus wins 2014 Alianta Gala AwardOctober 16, 2014This week CSAIL Director Daniela Rus was honored at the 2014 Alianta Gala Awards, an inaugural celebration of Romanian-American intercultural exchange. Read more on the Huffington Post website.
- Shafi Goldwasser gives keynote at 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in ComputingOctober 10, 2014Professor Shafi Goldwasser gave the keynote address at this week's 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which drew 8,000 attendees from around the world. She spoke about her work in cryptography and theory of computation, and how her gender has informed her career. Watch her...
- MOOCS - who is likely to drop out and why?October 09, 2014By crunching 130 million mouse-clicks, two CSAIL researchers have developed a machine-learning model that can predict with surprising accuracy whether or not a MOOC student will drop out of a given course.
- Getting metabolism right - analysis of metabolic processes finds flaws in nearly half, suggests correctionsOctober 08, 2014Metabolic networks are mathematical models of every possible sequence of chemical reactions available to an organ or organism, and they’re used to design microbes for manufacturing processes or to study disease. Based on both genetic analysis and empirical study, they can take years to assemble....
- New frontier in error-correcting codesOctober 02, 2014Error-correcting codes are one of the glories of the information age: They’re what guarantee the flawless transmission of digital information over the airwaves or through copper wire, even in the presence of the corrupting influences that engineers call “noise.”
- MIT's first-ever free online robotics course - open now!October 01, 2014CSAIL principal investigator Russ Tedrake is teaching MIT's first-ever online course on robotics, offered through edX. From the course description for "Underactuated Robotics":
