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Austin L. Day, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, holds up an IV bag filled with a brown-red liquid resembling bloody-mary mix. The unsavory concoction is Berkeley's entry in a genetic-engineering competition—a blood substitute called "Bactoblood," made from modified bacteria. (subscription required)
Video games like Dance Dance Revolution could soon require more than just fancy footwork. Small, cheap sensors for tracking the movement of a person's entire body could lead to "whole-body interfaces" for controlling computers or playing games, researchers say.
If your computer only has a single processor, you're at increasing risk for "core envy." The Intel Core 2 Duo chip in the latest Apple iMac, for example, contains two processors or cores, while the HP Pavilion Media Center desktop has a four-core chip. Sun has been making an eight-core version of its UltraSPARC T1 processor for data centers for two years, the Sony Playstation3 contains an eight-core processor, and eight-core processors for PCs will likely be on the market by 2009.
CSAIL's Computational Biology Group led by Manolis Kellis co-led one of the first large-scale comparisons of multiple animal genomes. Results of the project will appear in four papers in Nature, and 40 companion papers in Genome Research, Genetics, Nature Genetics, and other journals.
Imagine you are taking an introductory biology course. You're studying for an exam and realize it would be helpful to revisit the professor's explanation of RNA interference. Fortunately for you, a digital recording of the lecture is online, but the 10-minute explanation you want is buried in a 90-minute lecture you don't have time to watch.
After making a thought-provoking presentation on bioengineering a "bacterial assembly line," a jubilant team from Peking University won the grand prize "BioBrick" award in the fourth annual International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) competition held Nov. 3-4 at MIT.
Out of the 35 teams to attend the qualifying event for the DARPA Urban Challenge last week, team MIT was one of eleven vehicles to qualify and one of six vehicles to complete the race.
I arrived in Cambridge tonight and headed out to a pub near MIT to find the iGEM crew, who were supposed to meet up for an informal get-together before the Jamboree, iGEM's international synthetic biology contest, starts tomorrow (Nov. 3).
Even a garden-variety robot can memorize specific tasks. What sets Domo apart is its ability to recognize people and to sense and respond to its surroundings.
Once relegated to science-fiction movies and automobile assembly lines, robots are expected to handle more complex tasks in health care and agriculture, among other areas.
CSAIL PI Manolis Kellis helped organize the 4th Annual RECOMB Satellite on Regulatory Genomics, organized jointly by the Broad Institute, CSAIL, and Harvard Medical School.
The Boston area has become a leading robotics hub, with a larger cluster of related companies than any other area in the U.S., according to a group of panelists assembled for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum on Robotics Wednesday nigh
The impact of my research will be completely hidden and invisible. My work lives in the server rooms and data centers scattered all over the planet. Ideally, my work will help people design and build reliable systems that take advantage of the resources of many computers connected over networks.
Imagine you are driving around town when you pull up to a stop sign. As you glance over at the car across the intersection, you are astonished to see that there is no driver. As the car makes a smooth right turn, you realize that the car is driving itself.
Pawan Deshpande has received a Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation award for the high quality of his M. Eng. Thesis, "Decoding Algorithms for Complex Natural Language Tasks."
You may intuitively recognize those dirty clothes scattered across your bedroom floor or the piles of papers burying your desktop as a total mess, but scientists have now figured out a way to measure just how cluttered your room or cubicle really is.
MIT alumni Saul Griffith (S.M. 2001, Ph.D. 2004) and Yoky Matsuoka (S.M. 1995, Ph.D. 1998) have been awarded 2007 MacArthur fellowships, more commonly known as "genius" grants.
MIT researchers have developed a computer modeling approach that could improve a class of drugs based on antibodies, molecules key to the immune system.
On September 8 the world's geekiest geeks gathered at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts to talk about what happens if/when we make machines that are smarter than we are.
Three years ago, Wissam Jarjoui faced an uncertain future in an unstable place. The Palestinian student from East Jerusalem had never met an Israeli, and he hadn't even heard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Thirty-six teams from across the country are getting ready to compete in the ultimate robot challenge. Creating a robotic vehicle that can travel in any urban setting is the goal of the DARPA Urban Challenge.
Barbara Liskov, Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Wesley Harris, Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and currently head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, have been selected to share the office of Associate Provost for Faculty Equity, Provost L. Rafael Reif announced on Sept. 7.
Driving in urban traffic is a stupendously tricky task demanding a constant stream of split-second, almost subconscious decisions. In fact, if you give it too much thought-Am I driving inside the lane markers?
I had a long briefing with database legend Michael Stonebraker today, and I feel compelled to share a few highlights of the conversation. Stonebraker is known as a visionary, and he has consistently turned those visions into long-term bets through commercial startups.
CSAIL graduate student James McLurkin finds inspiration for his distributed robotic systems in nature. The behavior of his swarmbots, a swarm of 100 tiny robots, are based on the way insects communicate, specifically ants and bees.
Adobe Systems, the San Jose, CA-based company whose graphics and visual design programs are used by millions of people every day, has hired at least three prominent Boston-area computer scientists away from Cambridge's troubled Mitsubushi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL) to form Adobe's first significant research outpost outside the West Coast.
For many students getting into MIT is something they dream about, but will never achieve. Wissam Jarjoui, class of 2011, has always had dreams, but until he joined the program Middle East Education Through Technology (MEET) they did not include MIT.
CSAIL students David Moore, Edwin Olson, and Albert Huang conduct testing of MIT's DARPA grand challenge vehicle at a hangar at the South Weymouth Navel Air Station.
The invention of the Internet cannot be pinned down to any specific time, place or person as it was developed primarily for military and scientific applications throughout the 60s and 70s in the US.
Professor Hal Abelson, founder of the creative commons movement and MIT prof, talks to us about why computer science classes are becoming increasingly irrelevant and how AI might be the key to filling more seats
David Karger is a professor at MIT and a Principal Investigator on the Simile Project, an effort that seeks to enhance interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services.
David Karger is a professor at MIT and a Principal Investigator on the Simile Project, an effort that seeks to enhance interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services.
Last week the team tested its vehicle during a site visit by personnel from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is funding the work through the third DARPA Urban Challenge competition.
Four teams of researchers from universities in the U.S., Canada, Poland and the United Kingdom begin competing today in Portland, Oregon, to win a prize for the best open-source voting system.
MIT Professor Ronald L. Rivest, who helped develop one of the world's most widely used Internet security systems, has been named the 2007 Marconi Fellow and prize-winner for his pioneering work in the field of cryptography, computer and network security.
According to Webster's Online Dictionary semantic means "the relationships between symbols and what they represent." Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, has used the term to christen the Internet of the future.
Yesterday afternoon CSAIL had a chance to honor its outgoing Director, Rod Brooks at an ice cream social. The social featured a video of Brook's accomplishments, which ranged from professorships, authorships, new innovations in robotics, and one staring role in a movie.
Quipping that he is experiencing "a scientific mid-life crisis," legendary robotics pioneer Rod Brooks is stepping down as Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Brooks' reign at CSAIL, which he has directed since its 2003 formation, will formally end on Friday. However, today marks his first day in his new office, where he will take a year's sabbatical from teaching to embark on two grand challenges of robotics and computer science.
Martin Demaine is kidding, mostly, when he says this, but his puzzles have made cars safer, candies easier to unwrap, and maybe one day will help cure diseases. (Free Registration may be required.)
Student Street of the Stata Center has been buzzing with the excitement from the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams Odyssey for the past two days. Young inventors have converged on the Stata Center to display their inventions, made possible with grants from the Lemelson Foundation.
Professor Ed Lazowska of the University of Washington gave a Dertouzos Lecturer Series series talk titled "Computer Science: Past, Present, and Future" about the National Science Foundation's Computing Community Consortium.
People in downtown Ithaca, N.Y., got a glimpse this spring of the vehicular equivalent of a headless horseman--a Chevy Tahoe gutted and modified with computers, wire controls and sensors so that it can drive city streets by itself.
Assessing both academic and industrial research institutions, along with their scholars, can help identify the best organizations and individuals in a given discipline. Assessment can reveal outstanding institutions and scholars, allowing students and researchers to better decide where they want to study or work and allowing employers to recruit the most qualified potential employees. These assessments can also assist both internal and external administrators in making influential decisions; for example, funding, promotion, and compensation.
Snappy Dance Theater celebrates its 10th anniversary with the world premiere of String Beings, a collaboration with CSAIL research scientist and new media artist Jonathan Bachrach and BSO first violinist Lucia Lin.
Scientists in the US have developed a treatment for epilepsy that they say could help millions of people. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hope to try out the neurological pacemaker, which detects and treats seizures before they happen, this summer.
A team of mathematicians has set a new record for factoring a large number into primes, breaking a massive 307-digit number into its three indivisible factors and besting the previous mark by 30 digits. Written as a binary string of zeros and ones, the number is 1017 places or "bits" long--nearly as long as the 1024-bit numbers currently used to encode electronic messages--and the researchers' method of using a network of computers raises the prospect of hijacking PC and video-game systems to try to crack codes. However, security experts say they're confident they can stay ahead of would-be hackers.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--When it comes to robots, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab is one of the places in the world where the magic happens.
There's musical gene expression (see: Hank Williams the first, second, and third) and musical Gene expression (see: Gene Simmons with his tongue out). And then there's the Musical Gene Expression project at Harvard Medical School, which envisions a future where doctors will be able to tune in to the internal music of their patients.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The winners of the latest Ideas Competition took on big health issues facing poor countries by doing what most technology innovators do: apply the right mix of intellect, imagination and persistence to the problem.
Eric Mibuari '06 was not discouraged by the few electrical outlets in the church room donated for the new Laare Community Technology Centre. He'd grown up in Laare, a hilly Kenyan area 200 miles north of Nairobi, so he knew that electricity was spotty. He also knew he would find no shortage of creative energy among community members and church elders.
Some photos taken of the Stata Center by CSAILS Prof. Daniel Jackson will be featured this month in LensWork Extended, a publication that focuses on photography and the creative process.
In this episode we interview Rodney Brooks on behavior based robotics. He talks about how mosquitoes in Thailand caused a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence, how to build robots that sell, and how 50 years from now you'll be fighting with your robot for spare parts.
The number of cores--or number-crunching units--in microprocessors is doubling with each generation, providing enormous computing potential for desktops, laptops, and, eventually, handheld gadgets. Current quadcore machines, for example, are particularly useful for such computation-hungry applications as video processing and gaming.
PlayStation 101, anyone? For young scholars unafraid of giving their thinking caps a full workout, here is an academic subject to consider: MIT and IBM just announced the completion of a course in which students worked with the microprocessor that powers Sony Corp.'s PlayStation3 computer entertainment system.
CSAIL members Prof. David Karger and Dr. Karen Sollins will be performing on April 22nd, 2007 in different dance groups this weekend at NEFFA, the weekend for the New England Folk Festival Association.
Five members of the MIT faculty have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for 2007. They are Edmund Bertschinger, astrophysics division head and professor of physics; Erica Funkhouser, poet and lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; Michel X. Goemans, professor of applied mathematics; Erika Naginski, associate professor of the history of art; and Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning.
SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments), a collaborative project between MIT Libraries, David Karger, professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at CSAIL, and Eric Miller, CEO of Zepheira and formerly with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is breaking down limitations in software application interactions, making search functions more inclusive, and personalizing people's interactions with their computers.
In the futuristic cartoon series "The Jetsons," a robotic maid named Rosie whizzed around the Jetsons' home doing household chores--cleaning, cooking dinner and washing dishes.
Large mammals--humans, monkeys, and even cats--have brains with a somewhat mysterious feature: The outermost layer has a folded surface. Understanding the functional significance of these folds is one of the big open questions in neuroscience.
Jason Katz-Brown has been described as having a "certain MIT feel about him." This could refer to the fact that he wears cargo shorts in the dead of winter or the fact that he has a large pink seesaw in his dorm room. Or maybe it's because he has memorized every word in the Scrabble dictionary that he always carries in the pocket of those shorts.
NEW YORK, April 5 (AScribe Newswire) -- The ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) will present its 2007 Knuth Prize to Professor Nancy Lynch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for her influential contributions to the theory of distributed systems, which solve problems using multiple processes or computers connected through a shared memory or network.
A team of MIT programmers won a gold medal in the world finals of the 31st Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, held mid-March in Tokyo.
Until Tom Greene came to MIT 20 years ago in 1987 he always thought of his life in terms of decades, with each one ending like a chapter in a book. Two decades later, on the eve of his retirement, Greene's life no longer revolves around the same time table.
Aisha Walcott, a graduate student at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), recently traveled to Laare, Kenya as a representative of the Imara outreach program, which was funded by a grant from the MIT Public Service Center.
Lijin Aryananda, a recent graduate of CSAIL with Ph.D in humanoid robotics, left the Stata Center in February to pursue a post doctorate in Zurich, Switzerland. In the wake of her departure she left behind three years worth of friends, colleagues, mentors, and one special friend she built with her own hands. Mertz is an active vision robot and has been Aryananda´s constant companion for the past two years.
Terra Soft has claimed a fairly unique platform in the Linux community: Power Architecture computers, among which is Sony's PlayStation 3. More than a game box, the PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux runs as a low-cost home and office personal computer and Cell Broadband Engine development workstation. Linux ran on the PS2, but it was definitely a geek-only option. For the PS3, the geek factor was removed.
Last year, Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear.
If only political debates were this interesting. A quick-witted moderator, two opposing but well-behaved thinkers, and a central question any MIT loyalist would love: will humans ever build conscious, volitional, or spiritual machines?
Recognizing the importance of an open forum for the development of the predominant Web content technology, W3C invites browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to help design the next version of HTML by participating in the new W3C HTML Working Group. Based on significant input from the design and developer communities within and outside the W3C Membership, W3C has chartered the group to conduct its work in public and to solicit broad participation from W3C Members and non-Members alike.
In nature, colonies of ants, sometimes numbering in the millions, work their way back and forth in their nests, moving food, materials and waste for the benefit of the colony.
Some people learn better when they are being graded; some do worse. Some like to go over classroom material by saying it out loud to themselves; some like to teach it to others. Some said they learn best when they look, some when they listen and some when they draw pictures.
Each member of MIT's DARPA Grand Challenge team has their personal and professional reasons for participating in the Grand Challenge, the third competition held by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). Edwin Olson, a PhD candidate in EECS focusing on autonomous robotic navigation, envisions saving the lives of soldiers doing war-time supply runs. Seth Teller, an Associate Professor in EECS, sees the challenge as a milestone on the way to the eventual elimination of car accidents. Albert Huang, another EECS PhD student, dreams about the day that he can be driven safely to his parents' house while reading the newspaper.
Sam Madden '99, once an undergraduate in EECS and Masters of Engineering student at MIT, is currently enjoying the view from the other side of the desk as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Recently his job was made a little easier with the award of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship.
During IAP (independent activities period) each year the Stata Center's typically quiet halls echo with sounds of laughter and cheering as office chairs are raced down hallways, research abstracts are launched in garbage bins, and binder-clip parachutes sail overhead.
Tim Berners-Lee is testifying before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Chairman Edward Markey invited him as the sole witness for the first in a series on the Digital Future of the United States. Tim Berners-Lee's testimony concludes with an explanation of why we need web science.
Victor Zue, co-director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), will become sole director of the lab, effective July 1.
Academy of Engineering elects 5 from MIT - MIT News Office
February 14th, 2007
Five MIT researchers are among the 64 new members of the National Academy of Engineering.
While still in high school, Doug Ross performed a full assembly program of music he had composed. By his late 20s, he had developed a key computer language and coined the term computer-assisted design. A decade later, he taught MIT's first graduate course in software engineering. Perhaps not surprisingly, he occasionally thought daily tasks lacked sufficient challenge.
Scientists in Tomaso Poggio's laboratory at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT developed a computational model of how the brain processes visual information and applied it to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this first application of a biologically inspired computer model for artificial vision, which has many potential practical applications.
Aisha Walcott , a CSAIL graduate student, has sent back photographs from her current trip to the Laare Community Technology Centre (LACOTEC) where she is working in conjunction with CSAIL's Imara project and with support from the MIT PSC.
How many ballots have to be counted to detect vote counting errors that are big enough to change the outcome of an election? With more and more contested elections since 2000, the question is not just academic. According to an analysis by M.I.T. mathematician Ronald Rivest, in an average US House race with a 1% margin between candidates and 440 precinct counts, a 2% audit may only have a 27% chance of uncovering vote count error, while a 20% audit may have a 97% chance of uncovering vote count error.
From vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers to military landmine detectors, robots are becoming increasingly present in our daily lives. Living on Earth's Bruce Gellerman visits MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to meet a humanoid robot named Domo, its creator, PhD student Aaron Elsinger, and the man behind all the magic, CSAIL director Rodney Brooks.
On the water, cruising along with no paddles or people in sight, the kayaks look like the evidence of a day trip gone wrong. But one day, small robotic vessels like these, piloting themselves and loaded with high-tech gadgetry, could bring supplies to tsunami survivors or search for hidden explosives in coastal waters.
