Research

Impact Areas

Lead

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Group

Computational Biology Group

We seek to understand the mechanistic basis of human disease, using a combination of computational and experimental techniques.

Manolis Kellis

Leads

Manolis Kellis

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Manolis Kellis

Research Group

Computational Perception & Cognition

We combine methods from computer science, neuroscience and cognitive science to explain and model how perception and cognition are realized in human and machine.

Aude Oliva

Leads

Aude Oliva

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Aude Oliva

Research Group

Data-Driven Inference Group

We use machine learning and computer vision to improve outcomes in medicine, finance, and sports

John Guttag

Leads

John Guttag

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

John Guttag

Research Group

Decentralized Information Group

We are investigating decentralized technologies that affect social change.

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Leads

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Research Group

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

We aim to develop the science of autonomy toward a future with robots and AI systems integrated into everyday life, supporting people with cognitive and physical tasks.

+12

Daniela Rus

Leads

Daniela Rus

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniela Rus

+12

Daniela Rus

Research Group

Haystack Group

We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers blending approaches from human-computer interaction, social computing, databases, information management, and databases.

Lea Verou

David Karger

Leads

David Karger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

David Karger

Lea Verou

David Karger

Research Group

Infolab

We investigate language in different contexts: from how it is learned, to how it is grounded in visual perception, all the way to how machines can readily interact with humans.

Boris Katz

Leads

Boris Katz

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Boris Katz

Research Group

Machine Learning

We work on a variety of topics spanning theoretical foundations, algorithms, and applications.

Leads

Tamara Broderick

Tommi Jaakkola

Stefanie Jegelka

Leslie Kaelbling

David Sontag

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Tamara Broderick

Tommi Jaakkola

Stefanie Jegelka

Leslie Kaelbling

David Sontag

Research Group

Spoken Language Systems Group

Our goal is to create technology that makes it possible for everyone in the world to interact with with computers via natural spoken language.

Jim Glass

Leads

Jim Glass

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Jim Glass

Research Group

Led by Web inventor and Director, Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeff Jaffe, the W3C focus is on leading the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing standards, protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web

Leads

Tim Berners-Lee

Jeffrey Jaffe

Judy Brewer

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Wireless

Lead

Tim Berners-Lee

Jeffrey Jaffe

Judy Brewer

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

Research Group

Programming Methodology Group

We develop innovative approaches for building software and for solving problems in modern parallel and distributed software systems.

Barbara Liskov

Leads

Barbara Liskov

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Barbara Liskov

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

Lead

Daniel Jackson

Research Group

Supertech Research Group

We investigate the technologies that support scalable high-performance computing, including hardware, software, and theory.

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

Leads

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

Research Group

Algorithms Group

We devise new mathematical tools to tackle the increasing difficulty and importance of problems we pose to computers.

Leads

Costis Daskalakis

Erik Demaine

Michael Goemans

Piotr Indyk

David Karger

Jonathan Kelner

Tom Leighton

Charles E. Leiserson

Aleksander Madry

Ankur Moitra

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Nir Shavit

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Costis Daskalakis

Erik Demaine

Michael Goemans

Piotr Indyk

David Karger

Jonathan Kelner

Tom Leighton

Charles E. Leiserson

Aleksander Madry

Ankur Moitra

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Nir Shavit

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Group

Complexity Theory Group

Our interests span quantum complexity theory, barriers to solving P versus NP, theoretical computer science with a focus on probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP), pseudo-randomness, coding theory, and algorithms.

Leads

Shafi Goldwasser

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Michael Sipser

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Shafi Goldwasser

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Michael Sipser

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Group

Computational Connectomics Group

Our group’s goal is to create, based on such microscopic connectivity and functional data, new mathematical models explaining how neural tissue computes.

Nir Shavit

Leads

Nir Shavit

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Nir Shavit

Research Group

Quantum Information Science Group

Our research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.

Peter Shor

Leads

Peter Shor

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Peter Shor

Research Group

Theory of Distributed Systems Group

We work on a wide range of problems in distributed computing theory. We study algorithms and lower bounds for typical problems that arise in distributed systems---like resource allocation, implementing shared memory abstractions, and reliable communication.

Nancy Lynch

Leads

Nancy Lynch

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Nancy Lynch

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

Computation and Biology

Our lab focuses on designing algorithms to gain biological insights from advances in automated data collection and the subsequent large data sets drawn from them.

Bonnie Berger

Leads

Bonnie Berger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Bonnie Berger

Research Group

Computer-Aided Programming

We develop techniques and tools that exploit automated reasoning and large amounts of computing power to tackle challenging programming problems

Armando Solar-Lezama

Leads

Armando Solar-Lezama

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Armando Solar-Lezama

Research Group

Broderick Lab

We work in the areas of statistics and machine learning.

Tamara Broderick

Leads

Tamara Broderick

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

Lead

Tamara Broderick

41 Project Results matching all criteria

Project

Noria: a new data-flow system for web applications

We're developing a flexible, high-performance storage architecture for database-backed applications, based on a dynamic set of queries specified by the developer which Soup automatically optimizes.

Jon Gjengset

Malte Schwarzkopf

Leads

Jon Gjengset

Malte Schwarzkopf

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Jon Gjengset

Malte Schwarzkopf

Project

AdaptDB: Adaptive Partitioning for Distributed Joins

Our goal is to develop an adaptive storage manager for analytical database workloads in a distributed setting. It works by partitioning datasets across a cluster and incrementally refining data partitioning as queries are run.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

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

Alexandre Kaspar

Project

Aurum: Large Scale Data Discovery

Aurum is a data discovery system that works at large scale, helping people find relevant data.

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Bayesian Optimization for Global Optimization of Expensive Black-box Functions

We study the fundamentals of Bayesian optimization and develop efficient Bayesian optimization methods for global optimization of expensive black-box functions originated from a range of different applications.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Active Learning of Models for Planning

We aim to develop a systematic framework for robots to build models of the world and to use these to make effective and safe choices of actions to take in complex scenarios.

Leslie Kaelbling

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Leads

Leslie Kaelbling

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computation Structures Group

Leslie Kaelbling

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Project

BlueDBM: Distributed Flash Storage for Big Data Analytics

BlueDBM is an architecture of computer clusters consisting of fast distributed flash storage and in-storage accelerators, which often outperforms larger and more expensive clusters in applications such as graph analytics.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Algorithmic Aspects of Performance Engineering

Supertech Research Group

The project concerns algorithmic solutions for writing fast codes.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Wireless

Project

Tiramisu Compiler

Commit Group

A polyhedral compiler for expressing image processing, DNN, and linear/tensor algebra applications

Saman Amarasinghe

Leads

Saman Amarasinghe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Saman Amarasinghe

Project

Data Civilizer

Data scientists universally report that they spend at least 80% of their time finding data sets of interest, accessing them, cleaning them and assembling them into a unified whole.

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Database Design

The conventional wisdom described in all text books for performing database design is never followed in practice.

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Data Warehouse Construction

Historically, DBMSs in the warehouse space partitioned their data across a shared nothing
cluster.

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Autonomous Vehicle Databases

The impending success of AV technology will create vehicles that collect sensor data at a high rate.

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computation Structures Group

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Using Bitcoin to prevent identify theft

System piggybacks on the digital currency’s security protocols to thwart hijacked servers.

Srini Devadas

Leads

Srini Devadas

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Srini Devadas

Project

Better Models for Ride-Sharing

Traffic is not just a nuisance for drivers: It’s also a public health hazard and bad news for the economy.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Compression and Reordering for Parallel Graph Analytics

We plan to develop a suite of graph compression and reordering techniques as part of the Ligra parallel graph processing framework to reduce space usage and improve performance of graph algorithms.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Programming Abstractions for Dynamic Graph Analytics

We plan to develop a programming abstraction to enable programmers to write efficient parallel programs to process dynamic graphs.

Julian Shun

Leads

Julian Shun

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Julian Shun

Project

Bridging Theory and Practice in Shared-Memory Parallel Algorithm Design

This project aims to design parallel algorithms for shared-memory machines that are efficient both in theory and also in practice.

Julian Shun

Leads

Julian Shun

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Julian Shun

Project

Diversity-inducing Probability Measures

We aim to understand theory and applications of diversity-inducing probabilities (and, more generally, "negative dependence") in machine learning, and develop fast algorithms based on their mathematical properties.

Stefanie Jegelka

Suvrit Sra

Leads

Stefanie Jegelka

Suvrit Sra

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Geometric Data Processing Group

Stefanie Jegelka

Suvrit Sra

Project

Political Geometry: Establishing Fair Mathematical Standards for Political Redistricting

Gerrymandering is a direct threat to our democracy, undermining founding principles like equal protection under the law and eroding public confidence in elections.

Justin Solomon

Leads

Justin Solomon

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Justin Solomon

Project

Geometry in Large-Scale Machine Learning

Data often has geometric structure which can enable better inference; this project aims to scale up geometry-aware techniques for use in machine learning settings with lots of data, so that this structure may be utilized in practice.

Justin Solomon

Stefanie Jegelka

Leads

Justin Solomon

Stefanie Jegelka

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Justin Solomon

Stefanie Jegelka

Project

Crossing the Vision-Language Boundary

Building models that learn spoken language by seeing and hearing

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Eyebrowse: Social and Public Web Browsing

Haystack Group

Eyebrowse aims to create a social outdoors for your web browsing.

David Karger

Leads

David Karger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

David Karger

Project

Unsupervised Learning of Interpretable Representations from Sequential Data

Generation of sequential data involves multiple factors operating at different temporal scales. Take natural speech for example, the speaker identity tends to be consistent within an utterance, while the phonetic content changes from frame to frame. By explicitly modeling such hierarchical generative process under a probabilistic framework, we proposed a model that learns to factorizes sequence-level factors and sub-sequence-level factors into different sets of representations without any supervision.

Jim Glass

Leads

Jim Glass

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Simit: A Language for Computing on Sparse Systems

Jim Glass

71 People Results matching all criteria

PI
Core/Dual

Saman Amarasinghe

Professor

Compilers, architectures, software engineering

E saman@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8879

Lead

Commit Group

Tiramisu Compiler

Member

Taco: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

Halide

OpenTuner: An Extensible Framework for Program Autotuning

Program Performance Prediction with Deep Learning

Robust Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

Compilers, architectures, software engineering

Alexander Amini

Graduate Student

PhD Candidate. Deep Learning; Robotics

E Amini@mit.edu

Lead

Member

Self-Driving Vehicles

Natural Language Processing Group

PhD Candidate. Deep Learning; Robotics

Brandon Araki

Graduate Student

E araki@csail.mit.edu

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

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Natural language processing, machine learning

Cenk Baykal

Graduate Student

E baykal@mit.edu

RM 32-376C

Member

Coresets for Machine Learning Algorithms

Jonathan Behrens

Graduate Student

E behrensj@mit.edu

RM 32-G978B

Member

Noria: a new data-flow system for web applications

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

PI
Core/Dual

Tim Berners-Lee

Professor

Systems, privacy, inventor of the World Wide Web

E timbl@w3.org

T 253-5702

Lead

Decentralized Information Group

World Wide Web Consortium

Solid: Social Linked Data

Member

Computing & Society Community of Research

Systems, privacy, inventor of the World Wide Web

Laurent Bindschaedler

Postdoctoral Fellow

Systems for Big Data and ML. ML for Systems.

E bindscha@mit.edu

Member

Systems for Big Data and ML. ML for Systems.

PI
Core/Dual

Tamara Broderick

Associate Professor

Machine learning, statistics, Bayesian methods, inference

E tbroderick@csail.mit.edu

T 324-6749

Lead

Scalable Bayesian Inference via Adaptive Data Summaries

Scalable Bayesian inference with optimization

Broderick Lab

Member

Programming Systems Group

Machine learning, statistics, Bayesian methods, inference

PI
Core/Dual

Michael Carbin

Assistant Professor

Programming languages and systems.

E mcarbin@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5881

Lead

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

Member

Programming with spaces

Program Performance Prediction with Deep Learning

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Systems Community of Research

Programming languages and systems.

Irene Chen

Graduate Student

Machine learning, healthcare, fairness

E iychen@mit.edu

Member

Clinical Machine Learning Group

Unsupervised Speech Processing

Machine learning, healthcare, fairness

Xuhao Chen

Postdoctoral Associate

Parallel Computer Architecture, Data Mining, Machine Learning

E cxh@mit.edu

Parallel Computer Architecture, Data Mining, Machine Learning

Yu-An Chung

Graduate Student

Speech and language processing, machine learning

E andyyuan@mit.edu

Lead

Member

Is the Casino using a Riffle Shuffle?

Speech and language processing, machine learning

Adrian Dalca

Research Scientist

E adalca@csail.mit.edu

Member

Medical Vision Group

Clinical Neuroimaging

PI
Core/Dual

Costis Daskalakis

Associate Professor

Algorithms, Economics, Game Theory, Statistics, Machine Learning

E costis@csail.mit.edu

T 253-9643

Lead

Algorithms Group

Understanding Convergence of Iterative Algorithms

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)

Member

Algorithms, Economics, Game Theory, Statistics, Machine Learning

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

Barış Ekim

Graduate Student

E ekim@csail.mit.edu

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.

Wei Fang

Graduate Student

Language and speech processing, machine learning

E weifang@mit.edu

Member

Sensing, Learning and Inference

Language and speech processing, machine learning

Sue Felshin

Research Scientist

E sfelshin@csail.mit.edu

T 253-2965

Lead

START System

Member

Infolab

PI
Core/Dual

John Fisher

Senior Research Scientist

Vision, machine learning, signal processing

E fisher@csail.mit.edu

T 253-0788

Lead

Vision Group

Member

Visual Computing Community of Research

Vision, machine learning, signal processing

PI
Core/Dual

Jim Glass

Senior Research Scientist

speech and language processing

E glass@mit.edu

T 253-1640

Lead

Designing Information-Rich Embedding Spaces

Unsupervised Learning of Interpretable Representations from Sequential Data

Fact-Checking and Reasoning

Speaker Verification and Diarization

Automatic Speech Recognition

Language and Dialect Identification

Member

Using Computers to Eat Healthier

Low-Power Speech Processing Circuits

Crossing the Vision-Language Boundary

Unsupervised Speech Processing

Arabic Language Processing

Health-related Biomarkers from Speech

Community Question Answering

Understanding Language Representations in Deep Learning Models

Embodied Intelligence Community of Research

speech and language processing

PI
Core/Dual

John Guttag

Professor

Machine learning, medicine, data-driven inference

E guttag@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6022

Lead

Data-Driven Inference Group

Hidden Influencers, Risk and Causes of Infection

Predicting Adverse Events Across Changing Electronic Health Record Systems

Machine Learning for Insights in Basketball Strategy

Detecting Voice Misuse to Diagnose Disorders

Member

Systems Community of Research

Machine learning, medicine, data-driven inference

Lelia Hampton

Graduate Student

Ph.D. Student

E lelia@mit.edu

Ph.D. Student

22 News Results matching all criteria

Human-Computer Interaction Programming Languages & Software Engineering Big Data

February 22 '21

Helping data journalists create interactive graphics

Systems & Networking Big Data

August 10 '20

Data systems that learn to be better

Storage tool adapts to what its datasets’ users want to search.

Data systems that learn to be better

Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Graphics & Vision Big Data Transportation

October 29 '19

Deep learning with point clouds

Research aims to make it easier for self-driving cars, robotics, and other applications to understand the 3D world.

Deep learning with point clouds

Algorithms & Theory Computer Architecture Big Data Cybersecurity Health Care Internet of Things Manufacturing

January 31 '19

MIT hosts workshop on theoretical foundations of deep learning

Last week MIT’s Institute for Foundations of Data Science (MIFODS) held an interdisciplinary workshop aimed at tackling the underlying theory behind deep learning. Led by MIT professor Aleksander Madry, the event focused on a number of research discussions at the intersection of math, statistics, and theoretical computer science.

MIT hosts workshop on theoretical foundations of deep learning

Tim Berners-Lee was honored with the Turing Award for his work inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and "the fundamental protocols and algorithms [that allowed] the web to scale."

Computer Architecture Big Data Cybersecurity Education Energy Entertainment Health Care Internet of Things Wireless

May 02 '18

From Utopia to Dystopia in 29 Short Years

May 2, 2018 - Sir Tim Berners-Lee of MIT gave a Dertouzos Distinguished Lecture titled "From Utopia to Dystopia in 29 Short Years."

From Utopia to Dystopia in 29 Short Years

Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Big Data

April 26 '18

Building AI systems that make fair decisions

Harini Suresh, a PhD student at MIT CSAIL, studies how to make machine learning algorithms more understandable and less biased.

Building AI systems that make fair decisions

AI & ML Big Data Health Care

March 26 '18

Machine learning model predicts C. difficile infection risk

Model successfully applied to data from medical centers with different patient populations, electronic health record systems

Machine learning model predicts C. difficile infection risk

Algorithms & Theory Security & Cryptography Big Data Cybersecurity Education Entertainment Health Care Internet of Things Manufacturing

January 16 '18

Goldwasser, Micali, and Rivest win BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

This week it was announced that MIT professors and CSAIL principal investigators Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Ronald Rivest, and former MIT professor Adi Shamir won this year’s BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards in the Information and Communication Technologies category for their work in cryptography.

Goldwasser, Micali, and Rivest win BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

AI & ML Big Data Manufacturing

December 27 '17

Can computers help us synthesize new materials?

Last month, three MIT materials scientists and their colleagues published a paper describing a new artificial-intelligence system that can pore through scientific papers and extract “recipes” for producing particular types of materials.

Can computers help us synthesize new materials?

AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Big Data Education Entertainment Health Care Internet of Things

December 11 '17

Reading a neural network’s mind

Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing huge sets of training data, have been responsible for the most impressive recent advances in artificial intelligence, including speech-recognition and automatic-translation systems.

Reading a neural network’s mind

AI & ML Security & Cryptography Big Data Cybersecurity Internet of Things Transportation

November 02 '17

Fooling neural networks w/3D-printed objects

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of “neural networks” are increasingly used in technologies like self-driving cars to be able to see and recognize objects. Such systems could even help with tasks like identifying explosives in airport security lines.

Fooling neural networks w/3D-printed objects

Computer Architecture Programming Languages & Software Engineering Big Data

October 30 '17

Faster big-data analysis

We live in the age of big data, but most of that data is “sparse.” Imagine, for instance, a massive table that mapped all of Amazon’s customers against all of its products, with a “1” for each product a given customer bought and a “0” otherwise. The table would be mostly zeroes.

Faster big-data analysis

Model developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory could reduce false positives and unnecessary surgeries.

AI & ML Big Data Health Care

October 17 '17

Using artificial intelligence to improve early breast cancer detection

Every year 40,000 women die from breast cancer in the U.S. alone. When cancers are found early, they can often be cured. Mammograms are the best test available, but they’re still imperfect and often result in false positive results that can lead to unnecessary biopsies and surgeries.

Using artificial intelligence to improve early breast cancer detection

Researchers from CSAIL have devised a new system for data center caching that uses flash memory. In addition to costing less and consuming less power, a flash caching system could dramatically reduce the number of cache servers required by a data center.

Computer Architecture Big Data

September 04 '17

Making data centers more energy efficient

Most modern websites store data in databases, and since database queries are relatively slow, most sites also maintain so-called cache servers, which list the results of common queries for faster access. A data center for a major web service such as Google or Facebook might have as many as 1,000 servers dedicated just to caching.

Making data centers more energy efficient

Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have designed a new system that can efficiently search through hundreds of hours of video of laparoscopic surgeries to identify relevant events and visual features.

AI & ML Big Data Health Care

June 16 '17

Shrinking data for surgical training

Laparoscopy is a surgical technique in which a fiber-optic camera is inserted into a patient’s abdominal cavity to provide a video feed that guides the surgeon through a minimally invasive procedure. Laparoscopic surgeries can take hours, and the video generated by the camera — the laparoscope — is often recorded. Those recordings contain a wealth of information that could be useful for training both medical providers and computer systems that would aid with surgery, but because reviewing them is so time consuming, they mostly sit idle.

Shrinking data for surgical training

Daniel Jackson was awarded the Outstanding Research Award and Impact Paper Award (photo credit Sharona Jacobs)

Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Big Data Cybersecurity

June 02 '17

CSAIL's Daniel Jackson receives two ACM awards

This week the Association for Computer Machinery presented CSAIL principal investigator Daniel Jackson with the 2017 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award for his pioneering work in software engineering. (This fall he also received the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award for his research method for finding bugs in code.)An EECS professor and associate director of CSAIL, Jackson was given the Outstanding Research Award for his “foundational contributions to software modeling, the creation of the modeling language Alloy, and the development of a widely used tool supporting model verification.”

CSAIL's Daniel Jackson receives two ACM awards

MIT researchers have developed a new approach to training speech-recognition systems that doesn’t depend on transcription. Instead, their system analyzes correspondences between images and spoken descriptions of those images, as captured in a large collection of audio recordings.

AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Big Data

December 06 '16

Learning words from pictures

Speech recognition systems, such as those that convert speech to text on cellphones, are generally the result of machine learning. A computer pores through thousands or even millions of audio files and their transcriptions, and learns which acoustic features correspond to which typed words.But transcribing recordings is costly, time-consuming work, which has limited speech recognition to a small subset of languages spoken in wealthy nations.

Learning words from pictures

Big Data

November 02 '16

Hacking Archaeology: Beyond Shovels or iSandbox?

November 2, 2016 - Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama gave a Dertouzos Distinguished Lecture titled "Hacking Archaeology: Beyond Shovels or iSandbox?"

Hacking Archaeology: Beyond Shovels or iSandbox?

How artificial intelligence can be used to sift through thousands of pages of tax law to root out shady tax-shelters.

AI & ML Security & Cryptography Systems & Networking Big Data Cybersecurity

October 17 '15

Tax-evading corporations, watch out: our AI knows what you're doing

CSAIL researchers recently helped develop "STEALTH," a system that uses artificial intelligence to combat tax evasion by corporations.

Tax-evading corporations, watch out: our AI knows what you're doing

System that learns to distinguish words’ phonemes could aid development of speech-processing systems for under-studied languages

AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Big Data Education Entertainment Internet of Things

September 14 '15

Learning spoken language

Every language has its own collection of phonemes, or the basic phonetic units from which spoken words are composed. Depending on how you count, English has somewhere between 35 and 45. Knowing a language’s phonemes can make it much easier for automated systems to learn to interpret speech.In the 2015 volume of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, CSAIL researchers describe a new machine-learning system that, like several systems before it, can learn to distinguish spoken words. But unlike its predecessors, it can also learn to distinguish lower-level phonetic units, such as syllables and phonemes.

Learning spoken language

Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Systems & Networking Big Data Energy

July 17 '15

What better wind-speed prediction can do for the energy industry

When a power company wants to build a new wind farm, it generally hires a consultant to make wind speed measurements at the proposed site for eight to 12 months. Those measurements are correlated with historical data and used to assess the site’s power-generation capacity.This month CSAIL researchers will present a new statistical technique that yields better wind-speed predictions than existing techniques do — even when it uses only three months’ worth of data. That could save power companies time and money, particularly in the evaluation of sites for offshore wind farms, where maintaining measurement stations is particularly costly.

What better wind-speed prediction can do for the energy industry

Big Data

July 12 '12

ALFA Researchers Win Best Paper Award

Members of the CSAIL AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) were honored with the best paper award at the 2012 EvoPAR track of the Evo-Applications conference. The paper, "FlexGP: Genetic programming on the cloud," is co-authored by Dylan Sherry, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, James McDermott and Una-May O'Reilly.

The paper presents a prototyped design for a decentralized, robust genetic programming algorithm capable of operating on the cloud.

ALFA is lead by Dr. Una-May O'Reilly, a principal research scientist at CSAIL. The group is focused on developing efficient ways to solve hard optimization and design problems in domains of high complexity.

ALFA Researchers Win Best Paper Award

31 Group Results

Research Group

Algorithms Group

We devise new mathematical tools to tackle the increasing difficulty and importance of problems we pose to computers.

Leads

Costis Daskalakis

Erik Demaine

Michael Goemans

Piotr Indyk

David Karger

Jonathan Kelner

Tom Leighton

Charles E. Leiserson

Aleksander Madry

Ankur Moitra

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Nir Shavit

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Costis Daskalakis

Erik Demaine

Michael Goemans

Piotr Indyk

David Karger

Jonathan Kelner

Tom Leighton

Charles E. Leiserson

Aleksander Madry

Ankur Moitra

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Nir Shavit

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Group

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Our vision is data-driven machine learning systems that advance the quality of healthcare, the understanding of cyber arms races and the delivery of online education.

Una-May O'Reilly

Leads

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Group

Broderick Lab

We work in the areas of statistics and machine learning.

Tamara Broderick

Leads

Tamara Broderick

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Tamara Broderick

Research Center

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)

The MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML) works towards creating AI systems that are robust, reliable and safe for real-world deployment.

Aleksander Madry

Leads

Aleksander Madry

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Aleksander Madry

Research Group

Complexity Theory Group

Leads

Shafi Goldwasser

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Michael Sipser

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Shafi Goldwasser

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Michael Sipser

Ryan Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Research Group

Computation and Biology

Our lab focuses on designing algorithms to gain biological insights from advances in automated data collection and the subsequent large data sets drawn from them.

Bonnie Berger

Leads

Bonnie Berger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Bonnie Berger

Research Group

Computational Biology Group

We seek to understand the mechanistic basis of human disease, using a combination of computational and experimental techniques.

Manolis Kellis

Leads

Manolis Kellis

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Manolis Kellis

Research Group

Computational Connectomics Group

Our group’s goal is to create, based on such microscopic connectivity and functional data, new mathematical models explaining how neural tissue computes.

Nir Shavit

Leads

Nir Shavit

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Nir Shavit

Research Group

Computational Perception & Cognition

We combine methods from computer science, neuroscience and cognitive science to explain and model how perception and cognition are realized in human and machine.

Aude Oliva

Leads

Aude Oliva

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Aude Oliva

Research Group

Computer-Aided Programming

We develop techniques and tools that exploit automated reasoning and large amounts of computing power to tackle challenging programming problems

Armando Solar-Lezama

Leads

Armando Solar-Lezama

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Armando Solar-Lezama

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

Data-Driven Inference Group

We use machine learning and computer vision to improve outcomes in medicine, finance, and sports

John Guttag

Leads

John Guttag

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

John Guttag

Research Group

Decentralized Information Group

We are investigating decentralized technologies that affect social change.

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Leads

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Research Group

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

We aim to develop the science of autonomy toward a future with robots and AI systems integrated into everyday life, supporting people with cognitive and physical tasks.

+12

Daniela Rus

Leads

Daniela Rus

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniela Rus

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Daniela Rus

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

Research Group

Haystack Group

We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers blending approaches from human-computer interaction, social computing, databases, information management, and databases.

Lea Verou

David Karger

Leads

David Karger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

David Karger

Lea Verou

David Karger

Research Group

Infolab

We investigate language in different contexts: from how it is learned, to how it is grounded in visual perception, all the way to how machines can readily interact with humans.

Boris Katz

Leads

Boris Katz

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Boris Katz

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

Machine Learning

We work on a variety of topics spanning theoretical foundations, algorithms, and applications.

Leads

Tamara Broderick

Tommi Jaakkola

Stefanie Jegelka

Leslie Kaelbling

David Sontag

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Tamara Broderick

Tommi Jaakkola

Stefanie Jegelka

Leslie Kaelbling

David Sontag

Research Group

Programming Methodology Group

We develop innovative approaches for building software and for solving problems in modern parallel and distributed software systems.

Barbara Liskov

Leads

Barbara Liskov

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Barbara Liskov

Research Group

Quantum Information Science Group

Our research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.

Peter Shor

Leads

Peter Shor

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Peter Shor

Research Group

Sensing, Learning and Inference

We develop scalable algorithms for analysis of complex, high-dimensional data.

John Fisher

Leads

John Fisher

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

John Fisher

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

Lead

Daniel Jackson

Research Group

Spoken Language Systems Group

Our goal is to create technology that makes it possible for everyone in the world to interact with with computers via natural spoken language.

Jim Glass

Leads

Jim Glass

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Jim Glass

41 Project Results

Project

Active Learning of Models for Planning

We aim to develop a systematic framework for robots to build models of the world and to use these to make effective and safe choices of actions to take in complex scenarios.

Leslie Kaelbling

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Leads

Leslie Kaelbling

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Leslie Kaelbling

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Project

AdaptDB: Adaptive Partitioning for Distributed Joins

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Algorithmic Aspects of Performance Engineering

Supertech Research Group

The project concerns algorithmic solutions for writing fast codes.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

Wireless

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

Aurum: Large Scale Data Discovery

Aurum is a data discovery system that works at large scale, helping people find relevant data.

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Automatic Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been a grand challenge machine learning problem for decades. Our ongoing research in this area examines the use of deep learning models for distant and noisy recording conditions, multilingual, and low-resource scenarios.

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

Leads

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

Project

Autonomous Vehicle Databases

The impending success of AV technology will create vehicles that collect sensor data at a high rate.

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Bayesian Optimization for Global Optimization of Expensive Black-box Functions

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Better Models for Ride-Sharing

Traffic is not just a nuisance for drivers: It’s also a public health hazard and bad news for the economy.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computation Structures Group

Project

BlueDBM: Distributed Flash Storage for Big Data Analytics

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Bridging Theory and Practice in Shared-Memory Parallel Algorithm Design

This project aims to design parallel algorithms for shared-memory machines that are efficient both in theory and also in practice.

Julian Shun

Leads

Julian Shun

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Julian Shun

Project

Community Question Answering

Our main goal is to automatically search for relevant answers among many responses provided for a given question (Answer Selection), and search for relevant questions to reuse their existing answers (Question Retrieval).

Mitra Mohtarami

Leads

Mitra Mohtarami

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Mitra Mohtarami

Project

Compression and Reordering for Parallel Graph Analytics

We plan to develop a suite of graph compression and reordering techniques as part of the Ligra parallel graph processing framework to reduce space usage and improve performance of graph algorithms.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Coresets for Machine Learning Algorithms

Our goal is to design novel data compression techniques to accelerate popular machine learning algorithms in Big Data and streaming settings.

Daniela Rus

Leads

Daniela Rus

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniela Rus

Project

Crossing the Vision-Language Boundary

Building models that learn spoken language by seeing and hearing

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

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

Alexandre Kaspar

Project

Data Civilizer

Data scientists universally report that they spend at least 80% of their time finding data sets of interest, accessing them, cleaning them and assembling them into a unified whole.

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Data Warehouse Construction

Historically, DBMSs in the warehouse space partitioned their data across a shared nothing
cluster.

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Database Design

The conventional wisdom described in all text books for performing database design is never followed in practice.

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Determining Wikipedia's Influence on Science

Supertech Research Group

Wikipedia is one of the most widely accessed encyclopedia sites in the world, including by scientists. Our project aims to investigate just how far Wikipedia’s influence goes in shaping science.

Neil Thompson

Charles E. Leiserson

Leads

Neil Thompson

Charles E. Leiserson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Neil Thompson

Charles E. Leiserson

Project

Diversity-inducing Probability Measures

Stefanie Jegelka

Suvrit Sra

Leads

Stefanie Jegelka

Suvrit Sra

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Stefanie Jegelka

Suvrit Sra

Project

Eyebrowse: Social and Public Web Browsing

Haystack Group

Eyebrowse aims to create a social outdoors for your web browsing.

David Karger

Leads

David Karger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

David Karger

Project

Fact-Checking and Reasoning

Our main goal is to develop fact checking algorithms that can assess the credibility of claims mentioned in the textual statements and provide interpretable valid evidence that explains why a certain claim is considered as factually true or fake.

Mitra Mohtarami

Jim Glass

Leads

Mitra Mohtarami

Jim Glass

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Geometric Data Processing Group

Mitra Mohtarami

Jim Glass

Project

Geometry and topology for scientific computing and shape analysis

Computer Graphics Group

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

Justin Solomon

Leads

Justin Solomon

Research Areas

Impact Areas