Research

Impact Areas

Lead

Una-May O'Reilly

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

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

Internet of Things

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

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

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

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

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

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

+21

Sam Madden

Community of Research

Theory of Computation Community of Research

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.

+20

Costis Daskalakis

Leads

Costis Daskalakis

Research Areas

Computational Biology

Impact Areas

Lead

Costis Daskalakis

+20

Costis Daskalakis

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

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

Learning and Intelligent Systems

Wireless

Lead

Tim Berners-Lee

Jeffrey Jaffe

Judy Brewer

18 Project Results

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

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

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

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Impact Areas

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

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

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Alexandre Kaspar

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 Systems Group

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

Database Design

Data Systems Group

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

Michael Stonebraker

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

Project

Eyebrowse: Social and Public Web Browsing

Haystack Group

Theory of Computation Community of Research

Eyebrowse aims to create a social outdoors for your web browsing.

David Karger

Leads

David Karger

Research Areas

Impact Areas

David Karger

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

Geometric Data Processing Group

Impact Areas

Project

Political Geometry: Establishing Fair Mathematical Standards for Political Redistricting

Gerrymandering is a direct threat to our democracy, undermining founding principles like equal protection under the law and eroding public confidence in elections.

Justin Solomon

Leads

Justin Solomon

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Decentralized Information Group

Justin Solomon

Project

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

We are developing a general framework that enforces privacy transparently enabling different kinds of machine learning to be developed that are automatically privacy preserving.

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Leads

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Research Areas

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Impact Areas

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Project

SoFi - The Soft Robotic Fish

Exploration of underwater life with an acoustically controlled soft robotic fish

Joseph DelPreto

Leads

Joseph DelPreto

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

Transportation

Joseph DelPreto

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

Health Care

Project

Unsupervised Speech Processing

All humans process vast quantities of unannotated speech and manage to learn phonetic inventories, word boundaries, etc., and can use these abilities to acquire new word. Why can't ASR technology have similar capabilities? Our goal in this research project is to build speech technology using unannotated speech corpora.

Yu-An Chung

Sameer Khurana

Leads

Yu-An Chung

Sameer Khurana

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Health Care

Yu-An Chung

Sameer Khurana

19 People Results

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

Gregory Falco

Research Affiliate

Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.

E gfalco@mit.edu

Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.

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

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

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

Wildcard

Software design, programming, systems

PI
Core/Dual

Frans Kaashoek

Professor

Systems, networks, architectures

E kaashoek@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7149

Lead

Scaling Filesystems To Many Cores

Perennial

Member

Noria: a new data-flow system for web applications

Computation Structures Group

FSCQ: File-system verification

Systems, networks, architectures

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

Crowdsourcing in Graphics and Vision

Helping people manage information

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

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

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

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

unsupervised speech processing, automatic speech recognition

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.

PI
Core/Dual

Wojciech Matusik

Professor

Graphics, vision, fabrication, robotics, hci

E wojciech@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8432

Lead

Computer Graphics Group

Member

Computational Multicopter Design

Simit: A Language for Computing on Sparse Systems

InstantCAD: Interactive Design Exploration/Optimization for CAD Models

Visual Computing Community of Research

Embodied Intelligence Community of Research

Graphics, vision, fabrication, robotics, hci

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Graduate Student

Privacy and Big Data

E vaik@mit.edu

Lead

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

Member

Decentralized Information Group

Privacy and Big Data

PI
Core/Dual

Una-May O'Reilly

Principal Research Scientist

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

E unamay@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6437

Lead

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Adversarial Cyber Security

GIGABEATS: Data science for medical sensor data

MOOC Learner Project: Data science for e-learning

Member

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

PI
Core/Dual

Daniela Rus

Director

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

E rus@csail.mit.edu

T 258-7567

RM 32/ 32-368/ 374

Lead

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Social Network Extraction from GPS Datasets with Coresets

Safety Standards for Autonomous Vehicles

Soft Contact Modeling

Practical Secure Computation

Self-Driving Vehicles

Robust Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

Brain-Controlled Robots

Planning in Congestion for Autonomous Vehicles

Socially-Compliant Behavior for Autonomous Driving

Coresets for Machine Learning Algorithms

M-Blocks Modular Robotics

Robot Compiler

Distributed Robot Garden

Route and Motion Planning for Mobility-on-Demand with Rules of the Road

Member

Social Network Extraction from GPS Datasets with Coresets

Task-Driven Co-Optimization Of Articulated Robots

Wearable Blind Navigation

Drones that Drive

Better Models for Ride-Sharing

SoFi - The Soft Robotic Fish

Controlling drones and other robots with gestures

Using Muscle Signals to Lift Objects with Robots

Embodied Intelligence Community of Research

Helping robots learn using demonstrations

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

PI
Core/Dual

Arvind Satyanarayan

Assistant Professor

E arvindsatya@mit.edu

Lead

Visualization Group

Member

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)

Internet Policy Research Initiative

PI
Core/Dual

Daniel Weitzner

Principal Research Scientist

Web policy, cybersecurity, web architecture

E djweitzner@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8036

Lead

Keys Under Doormats

Computing & Society Community of Research

Member

Data Systems Group

Web policy, cybersecurity, web architecture

PI
Core/Dual

Nickolai Zeldovich

Associate Professor

Operating systems, hardware, programming languages

E nickolai@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6005

Lead

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

Scaling Filesystems To Many Cores

Vuvuzela: Metadata private messaging

Perennial

Member

Computation Structures Group

FSCQ: File-system verification