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.
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.
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.
We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers blending approaches from human-computer interaction, social computing, databases, information management, and databases.
We develop techniques for designing, implementing, and reasoning about multiprocessor algorithms, in particular concurrent data structures for multicore machines and the mathematical foundations of the computation models that govern their behavior.
The goal of the Theory of Computation CoR is to study the fundamental strengths and limits of computation as well as how these interact with mathematics, computer science, and other disciplines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The robot garden provides an aesthetically pleasing educational platform that can visualize computer science concepts and encourage young students to pursue programming and robotics.
To enable privacy preservation in decentralized optimization, differential privacy is the most commonly used approach. However, under such scenario, the trade-off between accuracy (even efficiency) and privacy is inevitable. In this project, distributed numerical optimization scheme incorporated with lightweight cryptographic information sharing are explored. The affect on the convergence rate from network topology is considered.
To explore how randomness in connectivity can improve the performance of secure multi-party computation (MPC) and the properties of communication graph to support MPC.
The Robot Compiler allows non-engineering users to rapidly fabricate customized robots, facilitating the proliferation of robots in everyday life. It thereby marks an important step towards the realization of personal robots that have captured imaginations for decades.
Uhura is an autonomous system that collaborates with humans in planning and executing complex tasks, especially under over-subscribed and risky situations.
In a pair of papers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), two teams enable better sense and perception for soft robotic grippers.
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.
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.
Last week CSAIL principal investigator Shafi Goldwasser spoke about cryptography and privacy as part of the annual congressional briefing of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI).
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.”
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.
