Research

Impact Areas

Lead

Una-May O'Reilly

Community of Research

Cognitive AI Community of Research

This CoR aims to develop AI technology that synthesizes symbolic reasoning, probabilistic reasoning for dealing with uncertainty in the world, and statistical methods for extracting and exploiting regularities in the world, into an integrated picture of intelligence that is informed by computational insights and by cognitive science.

Howard Shrobe

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Cybersecurity

Lead

Howard Shrobe

Research Group

Computer Graphics Group

Our group focuses on synthetic image generation, computational photography, digital manufacturing, and geometry.

Leads

Fredo Durand

William Freeman

Wojciech Matusik

Justin Solomon

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Fredo Durand

William Freeman

Wojciech Matusik

Justin Solomon

Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

This community is interested in understanding and affecting the interaction between computing systems and society through engineering, computer science and public policy research, education, and public engagement.

Daniel Weitzner

Leads

Daniel Weitzner

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniel Weitzner

Research Group

Geometric Data Processing Group

Our group studies geometric problems in computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, optimization, and other disciplines.

Justin Solomon

Leads

Justin Solomon

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Justin Solomon

Community of Research

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

The focus of the HCI CoR is inventing new systems and technology that lie at the interface between people and computation, and understanding their design, implementation, and societal impact.

Stefanie Mueller

Leads

Stefanie Mueller

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Manufacturing

Lead

Stefanie Mueller

Research Center

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Our mission is to work with policy makers and cybersecurity technologists to increase the trustworthiness and effectiveness of interconnected digital systems.

Leads

Daniel Weitzner

Hal Abelson

David Clark

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniel Weitzner

Hal Abelson

David Clark

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Research Group

Lecturers

Lecturers in CSAIL

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Cybersecurity

Research Group

Medical Vision Group

We develop new algorithms for medical image analysis and visualization of medical imagery.

Polina Golland

Leads

Polina Golland

Research Areas

Computational Biology

Impact Areas

Lead

Polina Golland

Research Group

Software Design Group

Our goal is to find better ways to make software, and ways to make software better.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Big Data

Cybersecurity

Lead

Daniel Jackson

Community of Research

Systems Community of Research

The Systems CoR is focused on building and investigating large-scale software systems that power modern computers, phones, data centers, and networks, including operating systems, the Internet, wireless networks, databases, and other software infrastructure.

+21

Sam Madden

Leads

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Computer Architecture

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

+21

Sam Madden

Community of Research

Vertical AI Community of Research

This CoR takes a unified approach to cover the full range of research areas required for success in artificial intelligence, including hardware, foundations, software systems, and applications.

Martin Rinard

Leads

Martin Rinard

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Martin Rinard

Research Group

Vision Group

Our researchers create state-of-the-art systems to better recognize objects, people, scenes, behaviors and more, with applications in health-care, gaming, tagging systems and more.

Leads

Ted Adelson

Fredo Durand

John Fisher

William Freeman

Polina Golland

Eric Grimson

Berthold Horn

Aude Oliva

Antonio Torralba

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Ted Adelson

Fredo Durand

John Fisher

William Freeman

Polina Golland

Eric Grimson

Berthold Horn

Aude Oliva

Antonio Torralba

Community of Research

Visual Computing Community of Research

The shared mission of Visual Computing is to connect images and computation, spanning topics such as image and video generation and analysis, photography, human perception, touch, applied geometry, and more.

+10

William Freeman

Leads

William Freeman

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computational Cognitive Science Group

Lead

William Freeman

+10

William Freeman

19 Project Results

Project

A Counterfactual Simulation Model of Causal Judgment

Cognitive AI Community of Research

We develop a computational model that explains how people make causal judgments in physical scenes by mentally simulating counterfactual outcomes and comparing those to what actually happened.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Project

AIRvatar System: A Framework for Analyzing Virtual Identities

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

AIRvatar is a system that telemetrically collects and analyzes fine-grained data on users’ virtual identities and the process used to create them.

D. Fox Harrell

Leads

D. Fox Harrell

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

D. Fox Harrell

Project

Alloy

Software Design Group

Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them. It has been used in a wide range of applications from finding holes in security mechanisms to designing telephone switching networks. Hundreds of projects have used Alloy for design analysis, for verification, for simulation, and as a backend for many other kinds of analysis and synthesis tools, and Alloy is currently being taught in courses worldwide.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Artificial Co-driver

By observing driver in real road situations, we learn a computer assistant that can make driving easier, safer and more enjoyable.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Cardiac MRI analysis

We develop image analysis algorithms for whole-heart cardiac MRI in patients with severe congenital heart disease.

Polina Golland

Leads

Polina Golland

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Polina Golland

Project

Characterizing the Sensitivity of Vision-in-the-Loop Driving Controllers Using CG

We work on understanding and improving vision algorithms used for self driving cars, by introducing synthetic data-sets to the loop.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Clinical Neuroimaging

We develop novel algorithms for neuroimage segmentation, registration, and joint modeling of brain structure with clinical and genetic data.

Polina Golland

Leads

Polina Golland

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Polina Golland

Project

Computational Bounce Flash for Indoor Portraits

To achieve high-quality photo lighting in challenging environments, our prototype camera dynamically reconstructs a 3D scene model and directs a motor-controlled flash head at nearby walls and ceilings for soft indirect illumination.

Lukas Murmann

Leads

Lukas Murmann

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Lukas Murmann

Project

Computational Knitting: Patterning and Shaping for Everyone

Knitting is the new 3d printing. It has become popular again with the widespread availability of patterns and templates, together with the maker movements. Lower-cost industrial knitting machines are starting to emerge, but we are still missing the corresponding design tools. Our goal is to fill this gap.

Alexandre Kaspar

Leads

Alexandre Kaspar

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Manufacturing

Alexandre Kaspar

Project

Computational Multicopter Design

A system that can help you to design our own drone!

Tao Du

Leads

Tao Du

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Energy

Manufacturing

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Tao Du

Project

Crowdsourcing in Graphics and Vision

Our goal is to develop new applications and algorithms that leverage the skills of distributed crowdworkers, notably for image and video processing applications.

Alexandre Kaspar

Leads

Alexandre Kaspar

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Big Data

Alexandre Kaspar

Project

Driver-Friendly Bilateral Control for Suppressing Traffic Instabilities

We are studying how best to implement bilateral control and make it acceptable to drivers

Berthold Horn

Leads

Berthold Horn

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Geometric Data Processing Group

Berthold Horn

Project

Geometry and topology for scientific computing and shape analysis

Developing state-of-the-art tools that process 3D surfaces and volumes

Justin Solomon

Leads

Justin Solomon

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Big Data

Justin Solomon

Project

Monitoring Fetal Health

We develop algorithms for fetal MRI interpretation, to enable noninvasive fetal monitoring from MRI.

Polina Golland

Leads

Polina Golland

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Polina Golland

Project

Peripheral Vision and Driver Behavior

Our goal is to understand what drivers can perceive when they are not attending to the road ahead and the consequences of their perceptions for safety.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Decentralized Information Group

Project

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

We are developing a general framework that enforces privacy transparently enabling different kinds of machine learning to be developed that are automatically privacy preserving.

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Leads

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Project

Quantification of Pulmonary Edema in Chest Radiographs

We develop machine learning algorithms to automatically and quantitatively assess the severity of pulmonary edema from chest x-ray images.

Polina Golland

Leads

Polina Golland

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Polina Golland

Project

Wearable Blind Navigation

We enable independent navigation for visually impaired users through a wearable feedback system using time-of-light sensors or depth cameras.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Where Are They Looking?

Our goal is to build a system that predicts where people are looking in images. Given an image and the location of a head, our approach follows the gaze of the person and identifies the object being looked at.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

28 People Results

Mazdak Abulnaga

Graduate Student

medical vision

E abulnaga@mit.edu

Member

Geometric Data Processing Group

Geometry and topology for scientific computing and shape analysis

medical vision

PI
Core/Dual

Ted Adelson

Professor

Vision, touch sensing, robotics

E adelson@csail.mit.edu

T 253-0645

Lead

Blood Pressure Imager

Member

Natural Language Processing Group

Vision, touch sensing, robotics

PI
Core/Dual

Regina Barzilay

Professor

Natural language processing, machine learning

E regina@csail.mit.edu

T 258-5706

Lead

Aspect-Augmented Adversarial Networks for Domain Adaptation

Member

Vertical AI Community of Research

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Natural language processing, machine learning

Yu-An Chung

Graduate Student

Speech and language processing, machine learning

E andyyuan@mit.edu

Lead

Unsupervised Speech Processing

Member

Spoken Language Systems Group

Speech and language processing, machine learning

Mustafa Doga Dogan

Graduate Student

E doga@mit.edu

Member

HCI Engineering Group

PI
Core/Dual

Fredo Durand

Professor

Vision, graphics, computational photography

E fredo@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7223

Lead

Computational Understanding of Visualizations and Graphic Designs

Member

Computational Bounce Flash for Indoor Portraits

Halide

Vision, graphics, computational photography

R. David Edelman

Director, Project on Technology, Economy & National Security

Machine learning, cybersecurity, governance

E rde@mit.edu

T 258-6389

Machine learning, cybersecurity, governance

Gregory Falco

Research Affiliate

Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.

E gfalco@mit.edu

Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.

Michael Foshey

Mechanical Engineer/Project Manager

Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, Digital Fabrication

E mfoshey@mit.edu

Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, Digital Fabrication

PI
Core/Dual

William Freeman

Professor

Vision, machine learning, Bayesian modeling

E billf@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8828

Lead

Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network

Member

Visual Dynamics: Probabilistic Future Frame Synthesis via Cross Convolutional Networks

Learning the Arrow of Time from Videos

3D Generative Adversarial Networks

Vision, machine learning, Bayesian modeling

PI
Core/Dual

Polina Golland

Professor

Vision, medical imaging, statistical inference

E polina@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8005

Lead

Quantification of Pulmonary Edema in Chest Radiographs

Cardiac MRI analysis

Clinical Neuroimaging

Member

Vision, medical imaging, statistical inference

PI
Core/Dual

Berthold Horn

Professor

Vision, computational imaging

E bkph@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5863

Lead

Driver-Friendly Bilateral Control for Suppressing Traffic Instabilities

Member

Crowdsourcing in Graphics and Vision

Vision, computational imaging

Alexandre Kaspar

Graduate Student

Graphics, crowdsourcing and hybrid fabrication.

E akaspar@mit.edu

Lead

Computational Knitting: Patterning and Shaping for Everyone

Graphics, crowdsourcing and hybrid fabrication.

Fern Keniston

Senior Administrative Assistant

Research and Education Support

E fern@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5860

RM 32/ 32-250A/ 391

Member

Clinical Decision-Making Group

Research and Education Support

PI
Core/Dual

John Leonard

Professor

Robotics, navigation/mapping, self-driving cars

E jleonard@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5305

Lead

Marine Robotics Group

Self-Driving Vehicles

Member

Robotics, navigation/mapping, self-driving cars

Ruizhi Liao

Graduate Student

E ruizhi@mit.edu

Member

Quantification of Pulmonary Edema in Chest Radiographs

Razvan Marinescu

Postdoctoral Associate

Postdoctoral Associate working with Polina Golland on neuroimaging.

E razvan@csail.mit.edu

RM 32-D475B

Member

Clinical Neuroimaging

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Postdoctoral Associate working with Polina Golland on neuroimaging.

PI
Core/Dual

Wojciech Matusik

Professor

Graphics, vision, fabrication, robotics, hci

E wojciech@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8432

Lead

Computational Multicopter Design

Member

Simit: A Language for Computing on Sparse Systems

InstantCAD: Interactive Design Exploration/Optimization for CAD Models

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Graphics, vision, fabrication, robotics, hci

PI
Core/Dual

Una-May O'Reilly

Principal Research Scientist

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

E unamay@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6437

Lead

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Adversarial Cyber Security

GIGABEATS: Data science for medical sensor data

MOOC Learner Project: Data science for e-learning

Member

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

PI
Core/Dual

Daniela Rus

Director

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

E rus@csail.mit.edu

T 258-7567

RM 32/ 32-368/ 374

Lead

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Social Network Extraction from GPS Datasets with Coresets

Safety Standards for Autonomous Vehicles

Soft Contact Modeling

Practical Secure Computation

Self-Driving Vehicles

Robust Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

Brain-Controlled Robots

Planning in Congestion for Autonomous Vehicles

Socially-Compliant Behavior for Autonomous Driving

Coresets for Machine Learning Algorithms

M-Blocks Modular Robotics

Robot Compiler

Distributed Robot Garden

Route and Motion Planning for Mobility-on-Demand with Rules of the Road

Member

Social Network Extraction from GPS Datasets with Coresets

Task-Driven Co-Optimization Of Articulated Robots

Wearable Blind Navigation

Drones that Drive

Better Models for Ride-Sharing

SoFi - The Soft Robotic Fish

Controlling drones and other robots with gestures

Using Muscle Signals to Lift Objects with Robots

Helping robots learn using demonstrations

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

Nalini Singh

Graduate Student

E nmsingh@mit.edu

RM 32-D475B

Member

PI
Core/Dual

Justin Solomon

Assistant Professor

Geometry, graphics, vision, machine learning, optimization.

E jsolomon@mit.edu

Lead

Geometric Data Processing Group

Geometry in Large-Scale Machine Learning

Political Geometry: Establishing Fair Mathematical Standards for Political Redistricting

Sensible Deep Learning for 3D Data

Optimal transport for statistics and machine learning

Geometry and topology for scientific computing and shape analysis

Member

Task-Driven Co-Optimization Of Articulated Robots

Geometry, graphics, vision, machine learning, optimization.

Andrew Spielberg

Graduate Student

E aespielberg@gmail.com

Lead

Robot Compiler

Member

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

PI
Core/Dual

Antonio Torralba

Professor

Vision, graphics, perception, machine learning

E torralba@csail.mit.edu

T 324-0900

RM 32-386G

Lead

Understanding Light via Deep Neural Networks

Understandable Deep Networks

Understanding Food images

Member

Predictive Vision

Where Are They Looking?

Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network

VirtualHome: Representing Activities as Programs

Places Database for Scene Recognition

Semantic Scene Understanding through ADE20K dataset

Crossing the Vision-Language Boundary

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)