Research

Impact Areas

Lead

Fredo Durand

William Freeman

Wojciech Matusik

Justin Solomon

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

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

Community of Research

Systems Community of Research

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.

+21

Sam Madden

Leads

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Computer Architecture

Security & Cryptography

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

+21

Sam Madden

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

Security & Cryptography

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

Eric Grimson

Berthold Horn

Aude Oliva

Antonio Torralba

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Health Care

Lead

Ted Adelson

Fredo Durand

John Fisher

William Freeman

Polina Golland

Eric Grimson

Berthold Horn

Aude Oliva

Antonio Torralba

Community of Research

Visual Computing Community of Research

The shared mission of Visual Computing is to connect images and computation, spanning topics such as image and video generation and analysis, photography, human perception, touch, applied geometry, and more.

+10

William Freeman

Leads

William Freeman

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Lead

William Freeman

+10

William Freeman

18 Project Results

Project

AIRvatar System: A Framework for Analyzing Virtual Identities

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

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

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

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

Computer-Aided Programming

Security & Cryptography

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

An Interlock for Self Driving Cars

Software Design Group

Vertical AI Community of Research

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

Self-driving cars are likely to be safer, on average, than human-driven cars. But they may fail in new and catastrophic ways that a human driver could prevent. This project is designing a new architecture for a highly dependable self-driving car.

Daniel Jackson

Armando Solar-Lezama

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Armando Solar-Lezama

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Armando Solar-Lezama

Project

Artificial Co-driver

By observing driver in real road situations, we learn a computer assistant that can make driving easier, safer and more enjoyable.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Characterizing the Sensitivity of Vision-in-the-Loop Driving Controllers Using CG

We work on understanding and improving vision algorithms used for self driving cars, by introducing synthetic data-sets to the loop.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Computational Bounce Flash for Indoor Portraits

To achieve high-quality photo lighting in challenging environments, our prototype camera dynamically reconstructs a 3D scene model and directs a motor-controlled flash head at nearby walls and ceilings for soft indirect illumination.

Lukas Murmann

Leads

Lukas Murmann

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Lukas Murmann

Project

Computational Knitting: Patterning and Shaping for Everyone

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.

Alexandre Kaspar

Leads

Alexandre Kaspar

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Manufacturing

Alexandre Kaspar

Project

Computational Multicopter Design

A system that can help you to design our own drone!

Tao Du

Leads

Tao Du

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Energy

Manufacturing

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Tao Du

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

Big Data

Alexandre Kaspar

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

Project

Driver-Friendly Bilateral Control for Suppressing Traffic Instabilities

We are studying how best to implement bilateral control and make it acceptable to drivers

Berthold Horn

Leads

Berthold Horn

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Berthold Horn

Project

OpenTuner: An Extensible Framework for Program Autotuning

Commit Group

OpenTuner is a new framework for building domain-specific multi-objective program autotuners.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Peripheral Vision and Driver Behavior

Our goal is to understand what drivers can perceive when they are not attending to the road ahead and the consequences of their perceptions for safety.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Self-Driving Vehicles

We want to help to make driving more comfortable, environmentally friendly and above all safer!

+10

Leads

Russ Tedrake

John Leonard

Daniela Rus

Sertac Karaman

Research Areas

Impact Areas

+10

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

Computer Architecture

Impact Areas

Saman Amarasinghe

Project

Video Data Querying

Data Systems Group

We are developing machine-learning technology to help users efficiently run data queries over large archives of raw video.

Sam Madden

Favyen Bastani

Leads

Sam Madden

Favyen Bastani

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Big Data

Sam Madden

Favyen Bastani

Project

Wearable Blind Navigation

We enable independent navigation for visually impaired users through a wearable feedback system using time-of-light sensors or depth cameras.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Health Care

Project

Where Are They Looking?

Our goal is to build a system that predicts where people are looking in images. Given an image and the location of a head, our approach follows the gaze of the person and identifies the object being looked at.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Health Care

14 People Results

PI
Core/Dual

Ted Adelson

Professor

Vision, touch sensing, robotics

E adelson@csail.mit.edu

T 253-0645

Lead

Blood Pressure Imager

Member

Vision, touch sensing, robotics

PI
Core/Dual

Fredo Durand

Professor

Vision, graphics, computational photography

E fredo@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7223

Lead

Computational Understanding of Visualizations and Graphic Designs

Member

Computational Bounce Flash for Indoor Portraits

Halide

Vision, graphics, computational photography

Michael Foshey

Mechanical Engineer/Project Manager

Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, Digital Fabrication

E mfoshey@mit.edu

Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, Digital Fabrication

PI
Core/Dual

William Freeman

Professor

Vision, machine learning, Bayesian modeling

E billf@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8828

Lead

Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network

Member

Visual Dynamics: Probabilistic Future Frame Synthesis via Cross Convolutional Networks

Learning the Arrow of Time from Videos

3D Generative Adversarial Networks

Vision, machine learning, Bayesian modeling

PI
Core/Dual

Berthold Horn

Professor

Vision, computational imaging

E bkph@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5863

Lead

Driver-Friendly Bilateral Control for Suppressing Traffic Instabilities

Member

Crowdsourcing in Graphics and Vision

Vision, computational imaging

Alexandre Kaspar

Graduate Student

Graphics, crowdsourcing and hybrid fabrication.

E akaspar@mit.edu

Lead

Computational Knitting: Patterning and Shaping for Everyone

Graphics, crowdsourcing and hybrid fabrication.

PI
Core/Dual

John Leonard

Professor

Robotics, navigation/mapping, self-driving cars

E jleonard@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5305

Lead

Marine Robotics Group

Self-Driving Vehicles

Member

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Robotics, navigation/mapping, self-driving cars

PI
Core/Dual

Wojciech Matusik

Professor

Graphics, vision, fabrication, robotics, hci

E wojciech@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8432

Lead

Computational Multicopter Design

Member

Simit: A Language for Computing on Sparse Systems

InstantCAD: Interactive Design Exploration/Optimization for CAD Models

Graphics, vision, fabrication, robotics, hci

PI
Core/Dual

Justin Solomon

Assistant Professor

Geometry, graphics, vision, machine learning, optimization.

E jsolomon@mit.edu

Lead

Geometric Data Processing Group

Geometry in Large-Scale Machine Learning

Political Geometry: Establishing Fair Mathematical Standards for Political Redistricting

Sensible Deep Learning for 3D Data

Optimal transport for statistics and machine learning

Geometry and topology for scientific computing and shape analysis

Member

Task-Driven Co-Optimization Of Articulated Robots

Geometry, graphics, vision, machine learning, optimization.

Andrew Spielberg

Graduate Student

E aespielberg@gmail.com

Lead

Robot Compiler

Member

Internet Policy Research Initiative

PI
Core/Dual

Gerald Sussman

Professor

Artificial intelligence, supercomputers

E gjs@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5874

RM 32/ 32-G508/ G514

Lead

Sussman Lab

The Car Can Explain!

Member

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

Artificial intelligence, supercomputers

PI
Core/Dual

Antonio Torralba

Professor

Vision, graphics, perception, machine learning

E torralba@csail.mit.edu

T 324-0900

RM 32-386G

Lead

Understanding Light via Deep Neural Networks

Understandable Deep Networks

Understanding Food images

Member

Predictive Vision

Where Are They Looking?

Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network

VirtualHome: Representing Activities as Programs

Places Database for Scene Recognition

Semantic Scene Understanding through ADE20K dataset

Crossing the Vision-Language Boundary

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)