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

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

Research Group

Computation Structures Group

Our mission is fostering the creation and development of high-performance, reliable and secure computing systems that are easy to interact with.

+21

Leads

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

Research Areas

Computer Architecture

Impact Areas

Lead

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

+21

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

Cryptography and Information Security Group

We seek to develop techniques for securing tomorrow's global information infrastructure by exploring theoretical foundations, near-term practical applications, and long-range speculative research.

Leads

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Group

Data Systems Group

We conduct research on all areas of database systems and information management.

+15

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

+15

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 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

Lecturers

Lecturers in CSAIL

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

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

Internet of Things

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

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

Computational Cognitive Science Group

Impact Areas

Lead

Martin Rinard

23 Project Results

Project

A Counterfactual Simulation Model of Causal Judgment

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

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Health Care

Project

Adversarial Cyber Security

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Our goal is to understand the nature of cyber security arms races between malicious and bonafide parties. Our vision is autonomous cyber defenses that anticipate and take measures against counter attacks.

Una-May O'Reilly

Leads

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Una-May O'Reilly

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

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Automated Attack Tree Generation for Critical Infrastructure

Using AI methods, we are developing an attack tree generator that automatically enumerates cyberattack vectors for industrial control systems in critical infrastructure (electric grids, water networks and transportation systems). The generator can quickly assess cyber risk for a system at scale.

Howard Shrobe

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Howard Shrobe

Project

Computational Multicopter Design

Computer Graphics Group

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

Tao Du

Leads

Tao Du

Research Areas

Computational Design and Fabrication Group

Impact Areas

Energy

Manufacturing

Transportation

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

Alexandre Kaspar

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

Data Garbling: Computing on Encrypted Data

We are investigating the limits of computing on encrypted data, with a focus on the private outsourcing of computation over sensitive data.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Project

Denial of Service Mitigation through Protocol Design

We aim to better understand the features of network protocols that facilitate denial of service attacks, in order to design more robust protocols and architectures in the future and evaluate existing designs more accurately.

Karen Sollins

Leads

Karen Sollins

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Karen Sollins

Project

Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors

Report warns of hacking risk to electric grid, oil pipelines, and other critical infrastructure

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Keys Under Doormats

Our report argues that giving the government special access to data poses major security risks

Daniel Weitzner

Leads

Daniel Weitzner

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Weitzner

Project

Poirot: Secure Protocol Implementation by Design

Software Design Group

Even formally verified protocols that have been faithfully implemented have been found to have security vulnerabilities. A new framework eliminates such vulnerabilities by design.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Optimization

To enable privacy preservation in decentralized optimization, differential privacy is the most commonly used approach. However, under such scenario, the trade-off between accuracy (even efficiency) and privacy is inevitable. In this project, distributed numerical optimization scheme incorporated with lightweight cryptographic information sharing are explored. The affect on the convergence rate from network topology is considered.

Hanshen Xiao

Leads

Hanshen Xiao

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Decentralized Information Group

Hanshen Xiao

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

Impact Areas

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Project

Random Graph with Applications in MPC

To explore how randomness in connectivity can improve the performance of secure multi-party computation (MPC) and the properties of communication graph to support MPC.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

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

Aleksander Madry

Project

Secure Public-Key Distribution

Our work aims to ensure nobody's listening in on your online activities, whether you are doing online banking or texting your friends via WhatsApp.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

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

Internet of Things

Howard Shrobe

Project

Security by Design for Cyberphysical Systems

Software Design Group

An approach to reducing risks of attack on cyberphysical infrastructure (such as water purification plants and electric grids) with new software design and analysis techniques.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Splinter: Practical Private Queries on Public Data

Splinter protects users’ queries on public data and scales to realistic applications.

Frank Wang

Leads

Frank Wang

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

Frank Wang

Project

Vuvuzela: Metadata private messaging

Vuvuzela is the first messaging system that provides differential privacy for users' metadata.

Nickolai Zeldovich

Leads

Nickolai Zeldovich

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Nickolai Zeldovich

Project

Where Are They Looking?

Vision Group

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

Kami: A Modular Deductive Hardware Verification Platform

Health Care

27 People Results

PI
Core/Dual

Adam Chlipala

Associate Professor

Programming languages, formal methods, security & privacy, systems

E adamc@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8439

Lead

Compilation Using Correct-by-Construction Program Synthesis

Programming Languages & Verification

Hemiola: Structural Design and Proof of Cache-Coherence Protocols

Member

Compilation Using Correct-by-Construction Program Synthesis

Programming with spaces

FSCQ: File-system verification

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Programming languages, formal methods, security & privacy, systems

PI
Core/Dual

David Clark

Senior Research Scientist

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

E ddc@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6003

Lead

Member

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

PI
Core/Dual

Henry Corrigan-Gibbs

Assistant Professor

E henrycg@csail.mit.edu

T 253-0301

RM 32-G970A

Peter Deutsch

Graduate Student

E pwd@mit.edu

PI
Core/Dual

Srini Devadas

Professor

Architectures, security, computer-aided design

E devadas@csail.mit.edu

T 253-0454

Lead

Using Bitcoin to prevent identify theft

Secure Demand Paging for Trusted Execution Environments

Scaling strong anonymity

Return of the Byzantine Generals

Member

Sanctum Secure Processor

A new way of handling all-to-all broadcast

Architectures, security, computer-aided design

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

Vision Group

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

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.

PI
Core/Dual

John Fisher

Senior Research Scientist

Vision, machine learning, signal processing

E fisher@csail.mit.edu

T 253-0788

Lead

Vision Group

Sensing, Learning and Inference

Member

Visual Computing Community of Research

Vision, machine learning, signal processing

Michael Foshey

Mechanical Engineer/Project Manager

Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, Digital Fabrication

E mfoshey@mit.edu

Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, Digital Fabrication

PI
Core/Dual

Frans Kaashoek

Professor

Systems, networks, architectures

E kaashoek@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7149

Lead

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

Scaling Filesystems To Many Cores

Perennial

Member

Noria: a new data-flow system for web applications

FSCQ: File-system verification

Clinical Decision-Making Group

Systems, networks, architectures

Fern Keniston

Senior Administrative Assistant

Research and Education Support

E fern@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5860

RM 32/ 32-250A/ 391

Member

Research and Education Support

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

Vertical AI Community of Research

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

Taylor Reynolds

Technology Policy Director

Technology Policy Director - Internet Policy Research Initiative

E treyn@mit.edu

Technology Policy Director - Internet Policy Research Initiative

PI
Core/Dual

Martin Rinard

Professor

Systems, programming languages and verification

E rinard@csail.mit.edu

T 258-6922

Lead

Member

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)

Systems, programming languages and verification

PI
Core/Dual

Ronald Rivest

Institute Professor

Cryptography, cybersecurity, RSA public-key encryption

E rivest@mit.edu

T 253-5880

Lead

Member

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Cryptography, cybersecurity, RSA public-key encryption

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

Embodied Intelligence Community of Research

Helping robots learn using demonstrations

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

PI
Core/Dual

Howard Shrobe

Principal Research Scientist

Architectures, cybersecurity, web policy

E hes@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7877

Lead

RADMAX

Risk-aware Network Resource Allocation

Automated Attack Tree Generation for Critical Infrastructure

Securing IoT

Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST)

Uhura: Personal Assistant that Manages Risk

Member

Architectures, cybersecurity, web policy

Dishita Turakhia

Graduate Student

PhD student in HCIE group at CSAIL

E dishita@mit.edu

Member

HCI Engineering Group

PhD student in HCIE group at CSAIL

PI
Core/Dual

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Associate Professor

Cryptography, encryption

E vinodv@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8444

Lead

Member

Geometric Data Processing Group

Cryptography, encryption

Yu Wang

Graduate Student

E wangyu9@mit.edu

RM 32-D475A

Member

Geometry and topology for scientific computing and shape analysis

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