Research

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

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

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

HCI Engineering Group

We work at the intersection of human computer interaction and personal fabrication tools.

Stefanie Mueller

Leads

Stefanie Mueller

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Stefanie Mueller

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 Group

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

We develop computing systems for creative expression, cultural analysis, and social change.

Peter Mawhorter

D. Fox Harrell

Leads

D. Fox Harrell

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Manufacturing

Lead

D. Fox Harrell

Peter Mawhorter

D. Fox Harrell

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

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

Multimodal Understanding Group

Our objective is to build techniques, software, and hardware that enable natural interaction with
computation.

Randall Davis

Leads

Randall Davis

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Randall Davis

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

Energy

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

Research Group

Usable Programming Group

We design and study systems that improve the learnability, efficiency, and safety of software development.

Rob Miller

Leads

Rob Miller

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Rob Miller

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

Berthold Horn

Aude Oliva

Antonio Torralba

Eric Grimson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Transportation

Lead

Ted Adelson

Fredo Durand

John Fisher

William Freeman

Polina Golland

Berthold Horn

Aude Oliva

Antonio Torralba

Eric Grimson

Research Group

Visualization Group

We use visualization as a petri dish to study intelligence augmentation, or how can computational representations and software systems help amplify our cognition and creativity, while respecting our agency?

Arvind Satyanarayan

Leads

Arvind Satyanarayan

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Arvind Satyanarayan

Research Group

World Wide Web Consortium

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

Computational Cognitive Science Group

Wireless

Lead

Tim Berners-Lee

Jeffrey Jaffe

Judy Brewer

30 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

Machine Learning

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

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Leslie Kaelbling

Tomas Lozano-Perez

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

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

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

Computer Architecture

Impact Areas

Transportation

Wireless

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

Decentralized Information Group

Impact Areas

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

Project

The Car Can Explain!

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

Developing techniques to allow self-driving cars and other AI-driven systems to explain behaviors and failures.

Gerald Sussman

Lalana Kagal

Leads

Gerald Sussman

Lalana Kagal

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Transportation

Gerald Sussman

Lalana Kagal

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

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Polina Golland

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

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

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Polina Golland

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

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

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Neil Thompson

Charles E. Leiserson

Project

Distributed Robot Garden

The robot garden provides an aesthetically pleasing educational platform that can visualize computer science concepts and encourage young students to pursue programming and robotics.

Leads

Joseph DelPreto

Lindsay Sanneman

Daniela Rus

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Geometric Data Processing Group

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

Justin Solomon

Project

Geometry in Large-Scale Machine Learning

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

Low-Power Speech Processing Circuits

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.

Leads

Research Areas

Computer Architecture

Impact Areas

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

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

Polina Golland

Project

Reliable and Robust Machine Learning

Algorithms Group

We work towards a principled understanding of the current machine learning toolkit and making this toolkit be robust and reliable.

Aleksander Madry

Leads

Aleksander Madry

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Aleksander Madry

Project

Robot Compiler

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.

Leads

Joseph DelPreto

Andrew Spielberg

Daniela Rus

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Project

Supervising Robots with Muscle and Brain Signals

What if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves?

Joseph DelPreto

Leads

Joseph DelPreto

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Joseph DelPreto

Project

Talkademic: Motivating Online Academic Discourse

Haystack Group

This research aims to build a system to facilitate online academic conversations.

David Karger

Leads

David Karger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

David Karger

Project

Uhura: Personal Assistant that Manages Risk

Computation Structures Group

Uhura is an autonomous system that collaborates with humans in planning and executing complex tasks, especially under over-subscribed and risky situations.

Leads

Yuening Zhang

Brian Williams

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Manufacturing

29 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

Embodied Intelligence Community of Research

Blood Pressure Imager

Member

Visual Computing Community of Research

Vision, touch sensing, robotics

PI
Core/Dual

Regina Barzilay

Professor

Natural language processing, machine learning

E regina@csail.mit.edu

T 258-5706

Lead

Natural Language Processing Group

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

Speech and language processing, machine learning

Adrian Dalca

Research Scientist

E adalca@csail.mit.edu

Member

Clinical Neuroimaging

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

Computational Understanding of Visualizations and Graphic Designs

Member

Computational Bounce Flash for Indoor Portraits

Halide

Visual Computing Community of Research

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

Sue Felshin

Research Scientist

E sfelshin@csail.mit.edu

T 253-2965

Lead

START System

Member

Infolab

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

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

Visual Computing Community of Research

Vision, medical imaging, statistical inference

Lelia Hampton

Graduate Student

Ph.D. Student

E lelia@mit.edu

Ph.D. Student

PI
Core/Dual

Daniel Jackson

Professor

Software design, programming, systems

E dnj@csail.mit.edu

T 258-8471

Lead

Rethinking Software Design

Software Design Group

Gitless: a simple version control system built on top of Git

Déjà Vu: Constructing Apps from Concepts

Security by Design for Cyberphysical Systems

Poirot: Secure Protocol Implementation by Design

An Interlock for Self Driving Cars

Alloy

Wildcard

Member

Espalier

Systems Community of Research

Wildcard

Software design, programming, systems

PI
Core/Dual

David Karger

Professor

Helping people manage information

E karger@csail.mit.edu

T 258-6167

Lead

Haystack Group

Mavo: Creating Interactive Data-Driven Web Applications by Authoring HTML

Algorithms Group

Wikum: Bridging Discussion Systems and Wikis with Collective Summarization

Squadbox: Combating Online Harassment using Friendsourced Moderation

Eyebrowse: Social and Public Web Browsing

Talkademic: Motivating Online Academic Discourse

Member

Theory of Computation Community of Research

Systems Community of Research

Helping people manage information

PI
Core/Dual

Boris Katz

Principal Research Scientist

Natural language processing

E boris@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6032

Lead

Infolab

START System

Semantic Parsing using Vision

Generating Plans for Agents using Video and Language

Inferring “Theory of Mind” with vision and language

Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST)

Member

Center for Brains, Minds and Machines

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Natural language processing

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

Sameer Khurana

Graduate Student

unsupervised speech processing, automatic speech recognition

E skhurana@mit.edu

Lead

Automatic Speech Recognition

Unsupervised Speech Processing

Language and Dialect Identification

Member

unsupervised speech processing, automatic speech recognition

Kimberle Koile

Lecturer

E kkoile@csail.mit.edu

Ruizhi Liao

Graduate Student

E ruizhi@mit.edu

Member

Quantification of Pulmonary Edema in Chest Radiographs

Henry Lieberman

Research Scientist

Henry Lieberman is a Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL, in AI and HCI.

E lieber@MEDIA.MIT.EDU

Henry Lieberman is a Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL, in AI and HCI.

Razvan Marinescu

Postdoctoral Associate

Postdoctoral Associate working with Polina Golland on neuroimaging.

E razvan@csail.mit.edu

RM 32-D475B

Member

Clinical Neuroimaging

Postdoctoral Associate working with Polina Golland on neuroimaging.

PI
Core/Dual

Rob Miller

Professor

Human-computer interaction, online education, software development

E rcm@csail.mit.edu

T 324-6028

Lead

Wait-learning: Intelligent Systems for Making Productive Use of Wait Time

Usable Programming Group

CilkPride

Member

Human-computer interaction, online education, software development

Nalini Singh

Graduate Student

E nmsingh@mit.edu

RM 32-D475B

Member