MIT CSAIL is celebrating six years of collaboration with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), which is part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha.
This fall CSAIL hosted a special meeting with QCRI focused on recent work and future areas of exploration between the two institutions.
“The work that we’ve been able to do together with MIT CSAIL has truly been second to none,” says QCRI executive director Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, pictured above (left) with MIT professor Sam Madden. “The way that we’ve been able to collaborate and learn from each other in the last few years has very much exceeded all of our expectations.”
The QCRI-CSAIL Computer Science Research Program has focused on a diverse range of topics, from database management and speech processing to shared computing and data analytics:
- A machine-learning system that can determine if a news outlet is inaccurate or politically biased
- Pic2Recipe, an AI that can look at a photo of a dish and be able to suggest similar recipes
- A project focused on developing accurate map-making techniques via crowd-sourcing
- Data Civilizer, a system for easier data-filtering that finds and links information scattered across digital files
- Interactive Dynamic Video, a new technique that lets you reach in and “touch” objects in videos using a normal camera
- Better speech and language processing technologies, particularly for addressing low-resource issues related to the Arabic language
“Our collaboration with QCRI has been extremely rewarding for our laboratory,” says CSAIL director Daniela Rus. “We have embarked on a wide variety of research projects that have had a major impact in the field of computer science, and look forward to continuing to keep the gradient with our future work.”