Research

Impact Areas

Lead

David Clark

Karen Sollins

David Clark

Karen Sollins

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

Applied Computing Group

We design software for high performance computing, develop algorithms for numerical linear algebra, and research random matrix theory and its applications.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Community of Research

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

This CoR brings together researchers at CSAIL working across a broad swath of application domains. Within these lie novel and challenging machine learning problems serving science, social science and computer science.

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 Group

Center for Brains, Minds and Machines

Our main goal is developing a computationally based understanding of human intelligence and establishing an engineering practice based on that understanding.

Tomaso Poggio

Leads

Tomaso Poggio

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Tomaso Poggio

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

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

Lead

Howard Shrobe

Research Group

Commit Group

We focus on finding novel approaches to improve the performance of modern computer systems without unduly increasing the complexity faced by application developers, compiler writers, or computer architects.

Saman Amarasinghe

Leads

Saman Amarasinghe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Saman Amarasinghe

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

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

Computation Structures Group

Our mission is fostering the creation and development of high-performance, reliable and secure computing systems that are easy to interact with.

+21

Leads

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

+21

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

Cryptography and Information Security Group

We seek to develop techniques for securing tomorrow's global information infrastructure by exploring theoretical foundations, near-term practical applications, and long-range speculative research.

Leads

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Group

Data Systems Group

We conduct research on all areas of database systems and information management.

+15

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

+15

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.

+11

Daniela Rus

Leads

Daniela Rus

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniela Rus

+11

Daniela Rus

Research Group

Genesis Group

The Genesis Group focuses on developing an account of human intelligence with special
emphasis on developing computational models of how people tell, perceive and understand
stories.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computational Cognitive Science Group

63 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

Learning and Intelligent Systems

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

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

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Project

AIRvatar System: A Framework for Analyzing Virtual Identities

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

Theory of Computation Community of Research

D. Fox Harrell

Project

Algorithmic Aspects of Performance Engineering

Supertech Research Group

The project concerns algorithmic solutions for writing fast codes.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

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

Computation Structures Group

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST)

Computational Cognitive Science Group

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

Our goal is to develop a socially intelligent team coacher agent that helps humans communicate, strategize, and work together efficiently.

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Brian Williams

Boris Katz

Zhutian Yang

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Transportation

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

Transportation

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Bayesian Optimization for Global Optimization of Expensive Black-box Functions

Learning and Intelligent Systems

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

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

Energy

Transportation

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

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

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Julian Shun

Project

Changing Minds via Roleplay in Interactive Digital Media

We aim to study the impact of computer-supported roleplaying in changing social perspectives of digital media users. Such media could take the form of videogames, VR systems, training software, and other types of interactive narrative technology.

Pablo Jose Ortiz-Lampier

D. Fox Harrell

Leads

Pablo Jose Ortiz-Lampier

D. Fox Harrell

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Pablo Jose Ortiz-Lampier

D. Fox Harrell

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

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Alexandre Kaspar

Project

Culturally-Grounded Virtual Identities: A Case Study in a Qatari Context

Mixed-methods qualitative (interviews and coding) and computational (AI) approach to understanding relationships between social identities, cultural values, and virtual identity technologies (e.g., online profiles and avatars).

D. Fox Harrell

Leads

D. Fox Harrell

Research Areas

Impact Areas

D. Fox Harrell

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

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Michael Stonebraker

92 People Results

PI
Core/Dual

Hal Abelson

Professor

Programming, privacy, App Inventor

E hal@mit.edu

T 253-5856

Lead

MIT App Inventor

Member

Computing & Society Community of Research

Programming, privacy, App Inventor

PI
Core/Dual

Saman Amarasinghe

Professor

Compilers, architectures, software engineering

E saman@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8879

Lead

Commit Group

Tiramisu Compiler

Member

Simit: A Language for Computing on Sparse Systems

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

Machine learning, statistics, Bayesian methods, inference

Noam Buckman

Graduate Student

PhD Candidate. Autonomous vehicles. Multi-robot systems.

E nbuckman@mit.edu

Member

Programming Systems Group

Self-Driving Vehicles

PhD Candidate. Autonomous vehicles. Multi-robot systems.

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

Sensorized Soft Electric Hands with Handed Shearing Auxetics

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

Lillian Chin

Graduate Student

E ltchin@mit.edu

Lead

Member

Unsupervised Speech Processing

Yu-An Chung

Graduate Student

Speech and language processing, machine learning

E andyyuan@mit.edu

Lead

Member

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Speech and language processing, machine learning

PI
Core/Dual

David Clark

Senior Research Scientist

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

E ddc@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6003

Lead

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Member

Computing & Society Community of Research

Systems Community of Research

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

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

Is the Casino using a Riffle Shuffle?

Understanding Convergence of Iterative Algorithms

Theory of Computation Community of Research

Member

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)

Algorithms, Economics, Game Theory, Statistics, 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

Computer Graphics Group