CSAIL Spotlights
- IBM and MIT to pursue joint research in artificial intelligence, establish new MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab
September 07, 2017IBM and MIT today announced that IBM plans to make a 10-year, $240 million investment to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab in partnership with MIT. The lab will carry out fundamental artificial intelligence (AI) research and seek to propel scientific breakthroughs that unlock the potential of AI... - Custom robots in a matter of minutes
August 23, 2017Even as robots become increasingly common, they remain incredibly difficult to make. From designing and modeling to fabricating and testing, the process is slow and costly: Even one small change can mean days or weeks of rethinking and revising important hardware.
But what if there were a way to... - High-quality online video with less rebuffering
August 14, 2017We’ve all experienced two hugely frustrating things on YouTube: our video either suddenly gets pixelated, or it stops entirely to rebuffer.
Both happen because of special algorithms that break videos into small chunks that load as you go. If your internet is slow, YouTube might make the next... - Watch 3-D movies at home, sans glasses
July 13, 2017While 3-D movies continue to be popular in theaters, they haven’t made the leap to our homes just yet — and the reason rests largely on the ridge of your nose.
Ever wonder why we wear those pesky 3-D glasses? Theaters generally either use special polarized light or project a pair of images that... - Teaching robots to teach other robots
June 08, 2017Most robots are programmed using one of two methods: learning from demonstration, in which they watch a task being done and then replicate it, or via motion-planning techniques such as optimization or sampling, which require a programmer to explicitly specify a task’s goals and constraints... - Eric Schmidt visits MIT to discuss computing, artificial intelligence, and the future of technology
May 10, 2017When Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt started programming in 1969 at the age of 14, there was no explicit title for what he was doing. “I was just a nerd,” he says.
But now computer science has fundamentally transformed fields like transportation, health care and education, and also... - Tim Berners-Lee wins $1 million Turing Award, "the Nobel Prize for computing"
April 04, 2017MIT Professor Tim Berners-Lee, the researcher who invented the World Wide Web and is one of the world’s most influential voices for online privacy and government transparency, has won the most prestigious honor in computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award... - MIT experts urge Trump administration to take immediate action on cybersecurity
March 28, 2017In a world where hackers can sabotage power plants and impact elections, there has never been a more crucial time to examine cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, most of which is privately owned.
According to MIT experts, over the last 25 years presidents from both parties have... - Security for multirobot systems
March 20, 2017Distributed planning, communication, and control algorithms for autonomous robots make up a major area of research in computer science. But in the literature on multirobot systems, security has gotten relatively short shrift.
In the latest issue of the journal Autonomous Robots, researchers from... - Putting data in the hands of doctors
February 23, 2017Regina Barzilay is working with MIT students and medical doctors in an ambitious bid to revolutionize cancer care. She is relying on a tool largely unrecognized in the oncology world but deeply familiar to hers: machine learning.
Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical... - CSAIL PhD has made seven robots, and still finds time to meditate.
February 03, 2017For Julian Straub, one man’s trash truly became his treasure when a microcontroller sparked a keen interest in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. The German native is a fourth-year EECS student studying how robots can better understand their surroundings. Straub studied electrical... - Wearable AI system can detect a conversation's tone
February 01, 2017It’s a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions such as Asperger’s, this can make social situations extremely stressful. But what if there was a more objective way to measure and understand our interactions?... - STUDY: CARPOOLING APPS COULD REDUCE TAXI TRAFFIC 75%
January 06, 2017Traffic is not just a nuisance for drivers: it’s also a public-health hazard and bad news for the economy.
Transportation studies put the annual cost of congestion at $160 billion, which includes 7 billion hours of time lost to sitting in traffic and an extra 3 billion gallons of fuel... - Creating videos of the future
December 20, 2016Living in a dynamic physical world, it’s easy to forget how effortlessly we understand our surroundings. With minimal thought, we can figure out how scenes change and objects interact.
But what’s second nature for us is still a huge problem for machines. With the limitless number of ways that... - Enabling wireless virtual reality
December 02, 2016One of the limits of today’s virtual reality (VR) headsets is that they have to be tethered to computers in order to process data well enough to deliver high-resolution visuals. But wearing an HDMI cable reduces mobility and can even lead to users tripping over cords.
Fortunately, researchers from... - Making computers explain themselves
November 15, 2016In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognize certain objects in digital... - CSAIL founder Robert Fano honored at 11/4 memorial
November 01, 2016Robert “Bob” Fano, a professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) whose work helped usher in the personal computing age, died in Naples, Florida on July 13. He was 98.
His memorial took place Friday, November 4 in Kirsch Auditorium. A link to the... - Epoch Foundation celebrates nearly 20 years of collaboration with CSAIL
October 17, 2016In 1998 there were no iPhones, no touchscreens and no Facebook, but there was the beginning of an idea. That idea was for MIT’s best and brightest computer scientists to join forces with a group of forward-looking global businesses, with the goal of helping invent the future of computing.
... - CSAIL director Daniela Rus on robots, AI & how to get girls into coding
September 12, 2016CSAIL Director Daniela Rus sat down with Forbes Magazine to discuss robotics, artificial intelligence, and inspiring other women in the field of computer science.
“Our goal is to invent the future of computing. We want to use computer science to tackle major challenges in fields like... - Heads of NSA, FBI, Akamai to discuss cybersecurity at CSAIL summit w/CNBC & Aspen Institute
September 11, 2016The Aspen Institute, CNBC, and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) are organizing the first-ever “Cambridge Cyber Summit” on October 5 at Kresge Auditorium on the MIT campus.
The one-day summit will bring together C-suite executives and business owners with public and... - Reach in and touch objects in videos with “Interactive Dynamic Video”
August 02, 2016We learn a lot about objects by manipulating them: poking, pushing, prodding, and then seeing how they react.
We obviously can’t do that with videos — just try touching that cat video on your phone and see what happens. But is it crazy to think that we could take that video and simulate how the cat... - Ingestible origami robot can patch wounds inside your stomach!
May 12, 2016In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at CSAIL, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields,... - First-ever 3-D printed robots made of both solids and liquids
April 18, 2016One reason we don’t yet have robot personal assistants buzzing around doing our chores is because making them is hard. Assembling robots by hand is time-consuming, while automation — robots building other robots — is not yet fine-tuned enough to make robots that can do complex tasks.
But if... - How this $10 laser could help self-driving cars
March 25, 2016The Microsoft Kinect was a boon to robotics researchers. The cheap, off-the-shelf depth sensor allowed them to quickly and cost-effectively prototype innovative systems that enable robots to map, interpret, and navigate their environments.
But sensors like the Kinect, which use infrared light to... - CSAIL, University of Cambridge team up for “Cambridge 2 Cambridge” cybersecurity hackathon
March 07, 2016With cyber-attacks and data privacy becoming increasingly important global concerns, many cybersecurity experts have called for more international collaboration in developing technologies to help us protect our data and systems.
To that end, this past weekend students from MIT’s Computer... - Marvin Minsky, founding father of AI (and CSAIL), dies at 88
January 25, 2016Marvin Minsky, a mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, died at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital on Sunday, Jan. 24, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 88.
Minsky, a professor emeritus at both CSAIL and the MIT Media Lab, was a pioneering... - PhD takes 1 million photos of Boston skyline over 5 years
January 19, 2016If a picture’s worth a thousand words, than Adrian Dalca is one seriously verbose researcher.
Over the last five years, the CSAIL PhD student has been snapping away at the Boston skyline from his MIT apartment, taking approximately one million shots with an assortment of GoPros, phone cameras and... - Could this app make you a better driver?
January 05, 2016Want to improve Boston’s recently-confirmed reputation for having the worst drivers in the country? Fortunately, now there’s an app for that.
Mobile-based telematics — apps and hardware that measure driving behaviors — may be the future of safer roads. Increasingly, people are using these... - Data, drones and 3D-printed hearts - the 7 coolest things that happened at CSAIL in 2015
December 08, 2015It’s been a busy year for MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Researchers won the Turing Award, created groundbreaking algorithms to fix code and detect disease, and developed exciting new robots and artificial-intelligence systems. As 2015 comes to a close,... - NASA gives CSAIL 6-ft-tall humanoid robot to develop software for future space missions
November 17, 2015This week NASA announced that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is one of just two institutions who will receive “R5,” a six-foot, 290-pound humanoid robot also known as “Valkyrie” that will serve on future space missions to Mars and beyond.
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