Research is the lifeblood of CSAIL. Applying computational thinking and advanced technologies, we pose difficult questions and pursue innovative answers. While research is our core activity, we view it not as an end in itself but as a means to an end. The goal is not merely to build our knowledge but rather to impact our world. Ultimately, our research is intended to someday improve the way we live, work, and play; heal, travel, and learn; manage our lives, and care for our environment. READ MORE >>
April 23, 2015
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/cloud-security-chips-0223In the last 10 years, computer security researchers have shown that malicious hackers don’t need to see your data in order to steal your data. From the pattern in which your computer accesses its memory banks, adversaries can infer a shocking
April 15, 2015
Today 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
April 10, 2015
CSAIL 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
March 31, 2015
This 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.”LeisersonMarch 30, 2015
In 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
March 25, 2015
Credit: Erica Ferrone PhotographyMichael 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
March 19, 2015
This 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
March 24, 2015
CAMBRIDGE, 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 haveMarch 02, 2015
CSAIL 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.
February 26, 2015
Here’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
February 26, 2015
When 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 dataFebruary 19, 2015
The 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
February 18, 2015
Computer 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
February 11, 2015
Educational 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
January 30, 2015
Every 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,January 21, 2015
This 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
January 21, 2015
Optimization 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
January 16, 2015
Imagine 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 youJanuary 12, 2015
For 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
January 08, 2015
Today 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
December 23, 2014
A 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 backDecember 22, 2014
Think 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
October 09, 2014
By 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.Kalyan Veermachaneni and Una-May O’Reilly used machine-learning techniques to analyze which
November 30, 2014
This 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
December 12, 2014
Communication 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,December 03, 2014
CSAIL 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
December 05, 2014
Computers 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
November 18, 2014
MIT 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
November 17, 2014
CSAIL 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 predictNovember 11, 2014
This 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
November 03, 2014
From 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.
October 08, 2014
Metabolic 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.October 02, 2014
Error-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.”But classical error-correcting codes
December 22, 2013
CSAIL Principal Investigator Srini Devadas and three former students have been selected as the 2014 winners of the Most Influential Paper Award at a prestigious systems research conference. Devadas, Edward Suh, Jae W. Lee, and David Zhang will be honored at next March’s Nineteenth
December 14, 2013
Imagine playing a video game like Call of Duty or Battlefield and having the ability to lead your virtual army unit while moving freely throughout your house.
Gaming could become this realistic, thanks to new technology developed by Dina Katabi’s research group at the MIT
December 12, 2013
Imagine playing a video game like Call of Duty or Battlefield and having the ability to lead your virtual army unit while moving freely throughout your house. Gaming could become this realistic, thanks to new technology developed by Dina Katabi’s research group at the MIT Computer Science
November 26, 2013
MIT's Dina Katabi discusses how researchers have created a technology that may give people x-ray vision. She speaks with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television's "Money Moves." (Source: Bloomberg)November 25, 2013
Yuan Luo, a PhD student in Professor Peter Szolovits’ Clinical Decision Making Group, has been awarded the first prize at the Natural Language Processing Doctoral Consortium in 2013 American Medical Informatics Association’s Annual Symposium. The presentation, “Subgraph Augmented
November 14, 2013
CSAIL graduate student Alvin Cheung has been named one of the 2013 Intel Labs U.S. PhD Fellowship Program Awardees. Cheung was selected for his work with, “making database applications perform using program analysis.”Cheung is a graduate student in the MIT Database Group and the
November 12, 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Abby Abazorius
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)
T: 617-324-9135; abbya@csail.mit.edu
-------------------
The Big Data Initiative at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) today announced two new activities aimed
November 06, 2013
CSAIL researchers were honored with the Best Paper Award at the 2013 Association for Computing Machinery’s Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications conference (OOPSLA) for their paper “Verifying Quantitative Reliability for Programs That Execute on Unreliable
October 31, 2013
Professor Anantha Chandrakasan, head of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has announced that Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, has been appointed the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Established in 1999October 29, 2013
CSAIL graduate student Anirudha Majumdar, postdoctoral associate Amir Ali Ahmadi, and Associate Professor Russ Tedrake were awarded the Best Conference Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). The group was honored for their paper “Control
October 25, 2013
During MIT’s Independent Activities Period in January 2010, a team of students and researchers from CSAIL and the Sloan School of Management came together with the idea of creating a new type of online restaurant recommendation service based off of semantic web technologies. Just three yearsOctober 24, 2013
CSAIL’s Spoken Language Systems Group has unveiled a new technique for automatically tracking speakers in audio recordings. The new technique tackles the task of speaker diarization, or computationally determining how many speakers are present in a recording. Traditional approaches to
October 21, 2013
New research by CSAIL Principal Research Scientist Aude Oliva provides new clues about the brain’s visual memory. In collaboration with Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) doctoral student Michelle Borkin and Professor Hanspeter Pfister, Oliva and graduate students ZoyaOctober 17, 2013
Members of the CSAIL Theory of Computation (TOC) group will be taking home top honors from the 2014 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) – Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA). Students, faculty and postdoctoral associates from TOC
October 09, 2013
On Monday, October 7, the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing (Wireless@MIT) hosted a one-day event showcasing new advances in wireless systems and mobile technology. The event featured talks by MIT faculty and researchers, as well as demonstrations of next generation wireless and
October 03, 2013
On Monday, October 7, reporters are invited to attend a one-day MIT event that will address some of the biggest challenges facing the wireless industry. Hosted by the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing (Wireless@MIT), the event will showcase the latest cutting-edge research
October 01, 2013
On September 13, 2013, Associate Professor Manolis Kellis took the stage at TEDxCambridge to explain his work with computational biology and his hopes for the future of medicine. Using his own genome as an example, Kellis described his work using advanced computer science techniques to transform
