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 are an interdisciplinary group of researchers blending approaches from human-computer interaction, social computing, databases, information management, and databases.
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.
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.
Our mission is to work with policy makers and cybersecurity technologists to increase the trustworthiness and effectiveness of interconnected digital systems.
MIT App Inventor is an intuitive, visual programming environment that allows everyone – even children – to build fully functional apps for smartphones and tablets.
We focus on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing educational methods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our goal is to develop collaborative agents (software or robots) that can efficiently communicate with their human teammates. Key threads involve designing algorithms for inferring human behavior and for decision-making under uncertainty.
Almost every object we use is developed with computer-aided design (CAD). While CAD programs are good for creating designs, using them to actually improve existing designs can be difficult and time-consuming.
The creation of low-power circuits capable of speech recognition and speaker verification will enable spoken interaction on a wide variety of devices in the era of Internet of Things.
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.
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.
Most robots are programmed using one of two methods: learning from demonstration, in which they watch a task being done and then replicate it, or via motion-planning techniques such as optimization or sampling, which require a programmer to explicitly specify a task’s goals and constraints.
Hyper-connectivity has changed the way we communicate, wait, and productively use our time. Even in a world of 5G wireless and “instant” messaging, there are countless moments throughout the day when we’re waiting for messages, texts, and Snapchats to refresh. But our frustrations with waiting a few extra seconds for our emails to push through doesn’t mean we have to simply stand by.
The butt of jokes as little as 10 years ago, automatic speech recognition is now on the verge of becoming people’s chief means of interacting with their principal computing devices. In anticipation of the age of voice-controlled electronics, MIT researchers have built a low-power chip specialized for automatic speech recognition. Whereas a cellphone running speech-recognition software might require about 1 watt of power, the new chip requires between 0.2 and 10 milliwatts, depending on the number of words it has to recognize.
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.