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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our goal is to develop new applications and algorithms that leverage the skills of distributed crowdworkers, notably for image and video processing applications.
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).
The robot garden provides an aesthetically pleasing educational platform that can visualize computer science concepts and encourage young students to pursue programming and robotics.
Our goal is to develop collaborative agents (software or robots) that can efficiently communicate with their human teammates. Key threads involve designing algorithms for inferring human behavior and for decision-making under uncertainty.
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.
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.
Uhura is an autonomous system that collaborates with humans in planning and executing complex tasks, especially under over-subscribed and risky situations.
The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has released a new video game called Grayscale, which is designed to sensitize players to problems of sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault in the workplace.
Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing huge sets of training data, have been responsible for the most impressive recent advances in artificial intelligence, including speech-recognition and automatic-translation systems.
Communicating through computers has become an extension of our daily reality. But as speaking via screens has become commonplace, our exchanges are losing inflection, body language, and empathy. Danielle Olson ’14, a first-year PhD student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), believes we can make digital information-sharing more natural and interpersonal, by creating immersive media to better understand each other’s feelings and backgrounds.
Most robots are programmed using one of two methods: learning from demonstration, in which they watch a task being done and then replicate it, or via motion-planning techniques such as optimization or sampling, which require a programmer to explicitly specify a task’s goals and constraints.
The butt of jokes as little as 10 years ago, automatic speech recognition is now on the verge of becoming people’s chief means of interacting with their principal computing devices. In anticipation of the age of voice-controlled electronics, MIT researchers have built a low-power chip specialized for automatic speech recognition. Whereas a cellphone running speech-recognition software might require about 1 watt of power, the new chip requires between 0.2 and 10 milliwatts, depending on the number of words it has to recognize.
Every language has its own collection of phonemes, or the basic phonetic units from which spoken words are composed. Depending on how you count, English has somewhere between 35 and 45. Knowing a language’s phonemes can make it much easier for automated systems to learn to interpret speech.In the 2015 volume of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, CSAIL researchers describe a new machine-learning system that, like several systems before it, can learn to distinguish spoken words. But unlike its predecessors, it can also learn to distinguish lower-level phonetic units, such as syllables and phonemes.
