- CSAIL crypto experts join MIT's new Digital Currency InitiativeApril 15, 2015Today it was announced that MIT is launching a new initiative aimed at studying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The Digital Currency Initiative will be led by Brian Forde, former White House senior advisor for mobile and data innovation, and will include researchers from the Media Lab and...
- How 3 CSAIL students fooled the world of scientific journalsApril 14, 2015In recent years, the field of academic publishing has ballooned to an estimated 30,000 peer-reviewed journals churning out some 2 million articles per year. While this growth has led to more scientific scholarship, critics argue that it has also spurred increasing numbers of low-quality “...
- VIDEO: "Game Changer" Daniela Rus is developing the next generation of robotsApril 10, 2015CSAIL Director Daniela Rus is developing the next generation of robots – ones that can tend a garden, bake cookies from scratch, cut a birthday cake, and even dance with humans. Learn more in a special video profile of Professor Rus done by WCVB's Chronicle as part of their "Game...
- W3C launches HTML5 online course in EdX partnershipMarch 31, 2015The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global technical standards organization for the Web housed at CSAIL, announced today that it has joined edX, one of the world's leading online course platforms, as a new member and will offer its first course on HTML5 on 1...
- Students' "Cybersecurity Factory" to help launch start-upsMarch 31, 2015Two MIT CSAIL PhD students, Jean Yang and Frank Wang, are launching an eight-week summer program that provides the capital, mentorship, and other resources and support needed to launch successful security startups.Those accepted to Cybersecurity Factory will be granted office space in Kendall...
- Charles E. Leiserson named SIAM fellowMarch 31, 2015This week the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics named CSAIL principal investigator Charles E. Leiserson as one of its 2015 Fellows for his “enduring influence on parallel computing systems and their adoption into mainstream use through scholarly research and development.”Leiserson...
- Reviewing online homework at scaleMarch 30, 2015In computer-science classes, homework assignments consist of writing programs. It’s easy to create automated tests that determine whether a given program yields the right outputs to a series of inputs. But those tests say nothing about whether the program code is clear or confusing, whether it...
- World's first "Algorithm Auction"March 26, 2015Ruse Laboratories and the website Artsy are hosting the world's first "Algorithm Auction," where you can bid on influential pieces of code like CSAIL researcher Hal Abelson's "Turtle Geometry." From Wired: Code is far from a utilitarian means to an end. Like painting or sculpting,...
Michael Stonebraker wins $1m Turing AwardMarch 25, 2015Credit: Erica Ferrone Photography Michael Stonebraker, a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) who has revolutionized the field of database management systems (DBMSs) and founded multiple successful database companies, has won the Association for...- A better debugger? System to find a common programming bug significantly outperforms predecessorsMarch 24, 2015CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Integer overflows are one of the most common bugs in computer programs — not only causing programs to crash but, even worse, potentially offering points of attack for malicious hackers. Computer scientists have devised a battery of techniques to identify them, but all have...
- Faculty promotions: Chlipala, Golland, Torralba & VaikuntanathanMarch 19, 2015This week it was announced that four CSAIL researchers have been promoted within the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department. Polina Golland and Antonio Torralba were promoted to full professor, while Adam Chilpala and Vinod Vaikuntanathan were promoted to...
- TED this week - take a look at past talks by CSAIL researchersMarch 16, 2015This week Vancouver is hosting the annual TED conference, which brings together executives, technologists and thought leaders to share ideas about technology, education, design and more. To get you in the mood, check out some TED talks given by CSAIL researchers past and present: CSAIL...
- CSAIL at SXSW 2015 this week: Data (In)securityMarch 09, 2015In recent years no technology issue has drawn as much debate as data privacy, from revelations about government surveillance to major corporate data breaches. The topic has spurred tough questions about the balance between access and privacy and how to use data to help solve problems without...
MIT announces 3 new cybersecurity initiativesMarch 02, 2015MIT Launches Three Institute-Wide Cybersecurity EffortsNew research programs to tackle technical, regulatory and business challenges.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – On Thursday, March 12, MIT launched three new research endeavors aimed at addressing the technical, regulatory and business challenges of...- VIDEO: Worker robots that can "think" on their feetMarch 02, 2015CSAIL roboticists are developing smart assembly-line robots that will learn from experience working alongside humans. Assembly line workers won't be swapping stories with their robotic counterparts any time soon, but future robots will be more aware of the humans they're working alongside.
- Senior Sheldon Trotman designs programs to streamline human behaviorFebruary 28, 2015When MIT senior Sheldon Trotman walks into any room, he almost instinctively looks for inefficiencies. The electrical engineering and computer science major is bent on streamlining our world, and has already founded several small companies that aim to do so. Even while meeting at a small coffee...
- How better machine learning can transform data scienceFebruary 26, 2015When Kalyan Veeramachaneni joined the Any Scale Learning For All (ALFA) group at MIT’s CSAIL as a postdoc in 2010, he worked on large-scale machine-learning platforms that enable the construction of models from huge data sets. “The question then was how to decompose a learning algorithm and data...
How an LED-filled “robot garden” can make coding more accessibleFebruary 26, 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...- Why robots still can't fold your laundryFebruary 25, 2015Folding laundry is simple for people but tough for robots.No machine can yet match a human’s dexterity and problem-solving abilities when attacking a pile of irregular shaped clothes of different fabric types and weight. The difference between picking up a lace nightgown versus unraveling a pair of...
- Mapping the human epigenomeFebruary 19, 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- CSAIL honors Anita Borg with special visit day for local studentsJanuary 18, 2015This week CSAIL opened its doors to a diverse group of local high school students as part of a global network of events meant to honor computer science pioneer Anita Borg. The special "CS visit day" included six schools visiting campus for demos, lab tours, discussion sessions,...
- 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...
