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As the new year begins, CSAIL students, professors and staff are invited to kick off 2011 with a fun twist on MIT’s traditional academic and extracurricular offerings, thanks to the Independent Activities Period (IAP).
Diving deep into the functional elements of the fruit fly to grasp a better understanding of human biology may seem like a long shot, but that’s exactly what CSAIL Principal Investigator Manolis Kellis and his colleagues have done.
For years CSAIL Principal Investigator Nancy Lynch has dedicated her efforts to creating stable access to unstable networks of devices. A paper on her work, which was largely funded by the National Science Foundation, can be found in this month’s issue of Distributed Computing.
Thanks to OrigaMIT, a life-size origami Triceratops skeleton is now on display in front of the Gates Tower elevators. The Triceratops will be on display throughout the week of December 13.
The futuristic technology of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, which saw star Tom Cruise work with a glove-controlled interface that allowed him to pull, drag and toss images around a computer screen, is now possible thanks to a new graphical interface coming out of CSAIL.
About 20 CSAIL students, researchers and staff gathered in the Kiva seminar room on Thursday, December 2 to watch NASA’s press conference on astrobiology research that NASA believes challenges fundamental concepts about requirements for life on Earth.
President Obama honored Scott Aaronson and Manolis Kellis with Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) earlier this month.
Rodney Brooks wowed the crowds with his presentation on Robots Working with People as part of CSAIL’s 2010-2011 Dertouzos Lecturer Series on Thursday, November 18.
One of the latest inventions coming out of CSAIL is a flat piece of semi-rigid plastic, about a half-millimeter thick, that can transform from an origami boat into a paper airplane, all without the aid of guiding human hands.
CSAIL Principal Investigator (PI) and MIT Professor Robert Morris has been honored with the 2010 Mark Weiser Award for over 20 years of innovation in the field of operating systems research.
CSAIL was awarded top honors at the ACM User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) conference this October in the form of best paper awards for two works created by CSAIL members.
CSAIL Professor Jonathon Kelner, along with CSAIL graduate student Aleksander Madry, undergraduate student Paul Christiano and Professors Daniel Spielman of Yale and Shanghua Teng of USC, have updated the max flow algorithm for the first time in 10 years.
It's fall once more, which means it's time for the return of CSAIL's annual Dertouzos Lecturer Series. Named in honor of former lab director Michael Dertouzos, the series brings some of the greatest minds in computer science and robotics to the Stata Center.
For decades, it's been the most compelling--and the most seemingly unsolvable--problem in computer science. Does P = NP? In other words, can a problem that can be checked by a computer also be solved by a computer? HP Labs mathematician Vinay Deolalikar claims to have definitively answered the question. But CSAIL's Scott Aaronson is certain that Deolalikar can't back it up.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched an initiative this week to fast-track the development of next-generation supercomputers. CSAIL is among four organizations tapped by the newly-founded Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program to help build the new system.
While much of the research being done at CSAIL is under wraps, some projects are available to the larger public. You can find the latest on Playground, CSAIL's collection of downloadable, homegrown programs and apps.
Two CSAIL Principal Investigators, Professors Leslie Kaelbling and Silvio Micali, have been named faculty Chairs in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Last month, the Agile Robotics team demonstrated their autonomous forklift for the U.S. Army Logistics Innovation Agency at Fort Lee in Virginia. The group, helmed by Professor Seth Teller, has modified a Toyota 8-Series lift truck to drive and manipulate pallets unmanned.
Thanks to a new computer program, the world may be one step closer to deciphering ancient languages that so far have eluded translation. The program is already is able to automatically translate the 3,000-year-old Ugaritic script by comparing its patterns with those of Hebrew text.
Why brake on the ground when you can brake in the air? That's the principal behind the Robot Locomotion Group's perching glider, developed by Russ Tedrake and Rick Cory. Made from flat-plane foam and using minimal controls, the glider has the ability to land on a perch.
Android smartphone users now have the power to create their own apps, thanks to a new do-it-yourself software tool from Google. App Inventor was spearheaded by CSAIL's Harold Abelson, who took a sabbatical from MIT to work on the project with Google.
CSAIL's Stephanie Seneff has been promoted to the position of Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. At CSAIL, Seneff is a Principal Investigator in the Spoken Language Systems group.
CSAIL researchers Daniela Rus and Erik Demaine, in partnership with Harvard University's Robert Wood, have developed a small resin-fiberglass sheet programmed to fold itself into three-dimensional shapes.
From June 28th to 30th, CSAIL and the Stata Center will play host to the 2nd Annual International Conference on Computational Sustainability (aka CompSust '10). The event looks into ways computation can bring us closer to an environmentally sustainable future.
If you're aiming to learn about the future of the World Wide Web, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better instructor than the man who invented it—Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He's one of five experts who will teach Linked Data Ventures, a new graduate-level course, next semester at MIT.
For CSAIL Lab Director Victor Zue, working with machines has always boiled down to communication. Interaction between humans and computers is imperfect now, but as Zue discusses in this piece from the MIT ILP Institute Insider, he hopes to one day change all that.
A number of CSAILers were among those to receive graduate degrees at last Friday's MIT Commencement. After the ceremony, a reception was held in the Stata Center to toast the lab's newly minted Masters and PhDs.
On Friday, June 4th, the Institute will hold its 144rd commencement ceremony. We here at CSAIL would like to join the speaker, Raymond S. Stata, in wishing our graduates luck on the next leg of their journey. The CSAIL students matriculating in both Masters and PhD programs are listed below; congratulations, and best wishes for an exciting future!
CSAIL hosted the Annual Meeting of the Industry Affiliates Program last week, an event that included demonstrations and talks on the latest research being done at the lab. The two-day conference gave CSAIL's industrial partners the chance to mingle with both researchers and fellow businesspeople.
KarDo, a startup venture developed at CSAIL, was one of six finalists in MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The contest annually awards $100,000 to an outstanding MIT student-generated business plan.
Shafi Goldwasser, RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is among 11 awardees of this year's Benjamin Franklin Medal. The award is given in the category of Computer and Cognitive Science, in honor of Goldwasser's contributions to modern cryptography.
Retired Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates paid a visit to CSAIL earlier this week during a visit to campus. Funds donated by Gates helped to make the Stata Center a reality, and the building's Gates Tower bears his name.
This week sees the naming of 229 new members to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest independent research societies in the United States. Among them are CSAIL's Edward H. Adelson, Nancy Ann Lynch, Michael Stonebraker, and Madhu Sudan.
Last week, the undergraduate class of 2014 got their first comprehensive look at MIT. During this year's Campus Preview Weekend, incoming freshmen and their families turned out in droves to get the inside scoop on CSAIL.
This summer, three CSAIL faculty members are teaching courses as part of MIT's Professional Education program. These Short Programs, which meet for two to five sessions, offer business professionals an opportunity to learn firsthand from top experts in academia.
In a project funded and tested by the US Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a team of CSAIL investigators is developing a new way to defend against hackers.
Privacy has always been a concern on the World Wide Web, but new findings show that personal information may be even more vulnerable than previously thought. A piece by Steve Lohr in the New York Times' Technology section cites several recent studies and projects about just how protected your protected information really is.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has found a new CEO in Jeffrey Jaffe, an MIT alumnus and tech industry stalwart. Jaffe brings with him past experience in executive roles at IBM, Bell Labs, and most recently Novell.
A team of researchers from colleges around the country, led by Purdue University's Wojciech Szpankowski, aim to change all that. Thanks to a new Science and Technology Center award from the National Science Foundation, they're well on their way.
One of five awarded this year out of 247 submissions, the NSF will grant Szpankowski and his affiliates $25 million to create Indiana's first Science and Technology Center. The team includes representatives from eight institutions, including CSAIL's Madhu Sudan, Nancy Lynch, Scott Aaronson, Peter Shor, and Ronald Rivest.
While in town for a concert at TD Garden, Black Eyed Peas mastermind William James Adams, Jr. (aka Will.i.am) paid a visit to the Stata Center for a tour of the labs. Aside from rapping, songwriting, and producing, Adams is also an amateur robotics enthusiast.
In an effort to streamline Wi-Fi access, CSAIL’s information technology team is installing a new wireless system in the Stata Center. The upgrade comes through Meraki, a networking company that was founded here at CSAIL in 2003 by then-PhD students John Bicket and Sanjit Biswas.
Since its inception in 2006, the Web Science Trust (originally the Web Science Research Initiative) has been working to advance our understanding of the internet’s impact on society. A joint effort between CSAIL and the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, the Trust is co-chaired by CSAIL principal investigators Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Weitzner.
Fledgling field though it may be, even synthetic biology has its underdog stories. Last year, upwards of 1,000 students from 100 schools flocked to the sixth annual iGem Jamboree to test their genetic engineering mettle. Using a standardized kit of biological parts, past competitors have created everything from yeast that fights malaria to E. coli that blinks.
In Michael Bernstein’s Interactive Technology Design Course, students learned how to marry style with innovation. Over the course of two weeks, participants went from preliminary sketches to prototypes of their own interactive technology devices.
Associate professor Rob Miller and grad student Tsung-Hsiang Chang have teamed up with the University of Maryland’s Tom Yeh to revolutionize the way we look at computer programming. They’ve created Sikuli, a system that allows programmers to bypass coding and create scripts visually.
In a recent New York Times story, Mike Melanson of ReadWriteWeb describes List.It as "post-it notes for the Twitter generation." The application is made to do just that: digital storage in extraordinarily accessible form.
