Research

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniel Weitzner

Research Group

Decentralized Information Group

We are investigating decentralized technologies that affect social change.

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Leads

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

Lalana Kagal

Tim Berners-Lee

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

Education

Lead

Stefanie Mueller

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

MIT App Inventor

MIT App Inventor is an intuitive, visual programming environment that allows everyone – even children – to build fully functional apps for smartphones and tablets.

Hal Abelson

Leads

Hal Abelson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Education

Lead

Hal Abelson

Research Group

Networks at MIT

We build new protocols and architectures to improve the robustness and performance of computer networks. We develop practical solutions in wireless networks, network security, traffic engineering, congestion control, and routing.

Dina Katabi

Leads

Dina Katabi

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Wireless

Lead

Dina Katabi

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

Sussman Lab

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.

Gerald Sussman

Leads

Gerald Sussman

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Education

Lead

Gerald Sussman

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

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

Eric Grimson

Berthold Horn

Aude Oliva

Antonio Torralba

Research Areas

Impact Areas

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

Lead

William Freeman

+10

William Freeman

24 Project Results

Project

3D Generative Adversarial Networks

We study the problem of 3D object generation. We propose a novel framework, 3D Generative Adversarial Network (3D-GAN), leveraging recent advances in volumetric convolutional networks and generative adversarial nets.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Networks and Mobile Systems

Project

Aggregate Congestion Control

Develop a method for sending persistently backlogged traffic on the Internet while adapting to link conditions dynamically.

Akshay Narayan

Francis Cangialosi

Leads

Akshay Narayan

Francis Cangialosi

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

Akshay Narayan

Francis Cangialosi

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

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

Better Models for Ride-Sharing

Traffic is not just a nuisance for drivers: It’s also a public health hazard and bad news for the economy.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Energy

Decentralized Information Group

Project

The Car Can Explain!

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

Cybersecurity

Gerald Sussman

Lalana Kagal

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

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

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

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

Tao Du

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

Vertical AI Community of Research

Berthold Horn

Project

EQ-Radio: Emotion Recognition using Wireless Signals

Networks at MIT

EQ-Radio can infer a person’s emotions using wireless signals. It transmits an RF signal and analyzes its reflections off a person’s body to recognize his emotional state (happy, sad, etc.).

Dina Katabi

Leads

Dina Katabi

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Dina Katabi

Project

Foundry: Design for Multi-Material 3-D Printing

A new approach for designs in multi-material fabrication

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

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

InstantCAD: Interactive Design Exploration/Optimization for CAD Models

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.

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

Decentralized Information Group

Project

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

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

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

Impact Areas

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Project

Securing IoT

IoT devices primarily use free embedded Linux which has many security flaws. We are conducting penetration tests on IoT and developing a secure version of embedded Linux.

Howard Shrobe

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Cybersecurity

Geometric Data Processing Group

Howard Shrobe

Project

Sensible Deep Learning for 3D Data

Machine Learning

Developing state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms for analyzing and modeling 3D geometry

Justin Solomon

Leads

Justin Solomon

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Justin Solomon

Project

Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network

We aim to understand 3D object structure from a single image. We propose an end-to-end framework which sequentially estimates 2D keypoint heatmaps and 3D object structure, by training it on both real 2D-annotated images and synthetic 3D data and by integrating a 3D-to-2D projection layer.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Decentralized Information Group

Project

Solid: Social Linked Data

Solid aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.

Tim Berners-Lee

Lalana Kagal

Leads

Tim Berners-Lee

Lalana Kagal

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Cybersecurity

Tim Berners-Lee

Lalana Kagal

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

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

27 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

Noria: a new data-flow system for web applications

Vision, touch sensing, robotics

Jonathan Behrens

Graduate Student

E behrensj@mit.edu

RM 32-G978B

Member

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

PI
Core/Dual

David Clark

Senior Research Scientist

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

E ddc@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6003

Lead

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Member

Systems Community of Research

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

Mustafa Doga Dogan

Graduate Student

E doga@mit.edu

Member

HCI Engineering Group

Tao Du

Graduate Student

CS PhD student

E taodu@csail.mit.edu

Lead

Computational Multicopter Design

CS PhD student

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

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.

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

Learning and Intelligent Systems

Vision, computational imaging

PI
Core/Dual

Leslie Kaelbling

Professor

Robotics, machine learning, motion planning

E lpk@csail.mit.edu

T 258-9695

Lead

Machine Learning

Learning and Optimization

Robotic Planning and Manipulation with Force Information

Reliable Robotic Construction of Multi-object Arrangements

Learning and Planning with Compressed Linear Expectation Models

Active Learning of Models for Planning

Task and Motion Planning for Autonomous Robots

Member

Robotics, machine learning, motion planning

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

Human-Computer Interaction Community of Research

Theory of Computation Community of Research

Systems Community of Research

Helping people manage information

Alexandre Kaspar

Graduate Student

Graphics, crowdsourcing and hybrid fabrication.

E akaspar@mit.edu

Lead

Crowdsourcing in Graphics and Vision

Computational Knitting: Patterning and Shaping for Everyone

Graphics, crowdsourcing and hybrid fabrication.

PI
Core/Dual

Dina Katabi

Professor

Wireless, networks, machine learning

E dina@csail.mit.edu

T 324-6027

Lead

Networks at MIT

EQ-Radio: Emotion Recognition using Wireless Signals

Member

Vertical AI Community of Research

Wireless, networks, machine learning

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

Learning and Intelligent Systems

Robotics, navigation/mapping, self-driving cars

PI
Core/Dual

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Professor

Robotics, artificial intelligence

E tlp@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7889

Lead

Learning and Optimization

Robotic Planning and Manipulation with Force Information

Reliable Robotic Construction of Multi-object Arrangements

Learning and Planning with Compressed Linear Expectation Models

Active Learning of Models for Planning

Task and Motion Planning for Autonomous Robots

Member

Aurum: Large Scale Data Discovery

Robotics, artificial intelligence

PI
Core/Dual

Sam Madden

Professor

Systems for processing and manipulating data

E madden@csail.mit.edu

T 258-6643

Lead

Data Systems Group

System that Learns From IoT

Data Civilizer

Autonomous Vehicle Databases

Building a Scalable Database for Autonomous Vehicles

Chameleon: Using Machine Learning to Make Databases Faster!

Data Discovery

Systems Community of Research

Video Data Querying

Starling: Query Optimization for Cloud Services

Member

Aurum: Large Scale Data Discovery

Computation Structures Group

Systems for processing and manipulating data

PI
Core/Dual

Wojciech Matusik

Professor

Graphics, vision, fabrication, robotics, hci

E wojciech@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8432

Lead

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

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

Daniela Rus

Director

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

E rus@csail.mit.edu

T 258-7567

RM 32/ 32-368/ 374

Lead

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

Helping robots learn using demonstrations

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

Dmitriy Smirnov

Graduate Student

https://people.csail.mit.edu/smirnov/

E smirnov@mit.edu

RM 32-D475B

Member

Geometric Data Processing Group

Sensible Deep Learning for 3D Data

https://people.csail.mit.edu/smirnov/

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

Computational Cognitive Science Group

Joshua Tenenbaum

Professor

Computational cognitive science, machine learning

E jbt@csail.mit.edu

T 452-2010

RM 46-4015

Lead

Member

Center for Brains, Minds and Machines

Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network

3D Generative Adversarial Networks