Research

Impact Areas

Lead

David Clark

Karen Sollins

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Research Group

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Our vision is data-driven machine learning systems that advance the quality of healthcare, the understanding of cyber arms races and the delivery of online education.

Una-May O'Reilly

Leads

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Una-May O'Reilly

Community of Research

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

This CoR brings together researchers at CSAIL working across a broad swath of application domains. Within these lie novel and challenging machine learning problems serving science, social science and computer science.

Una-May O'Reilly

Leads

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Areas

Computational Biology

Impact Areas

Health Care

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

Graphics & Vision

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

Commit Group

We focus on finding novel approaches to improve the performance of modern computer systems without unduly increasing the complexity faced by application developers, compiler writers, or computer architects.

Saman Amarasinghe

Leads

Saman Amarasinghe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Saman Amarasinghe

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

Impact Areas

Lead

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

+21

Research Group

Computer-Aided Programming

We develop techniques and tools that exploit automated reasoning and large amounts of computing power to tackle challenging programming problems

Armando Solar-Lezama

Leads

Armando Solar-Lezama

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Armando Solar-Lezama

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

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

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

Lead

David Karger

Lea Verou

David Karger

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

Graphics & Vision

Impact Areas

Entertainment

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

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

Lead

Hal Abelson

Research Group

Programming Languages and Software Engineering

We research programming languages, software engineering, and related work in human-computer interaction.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Research Group

Programming Methodology Group

We develop innovative approaches for building software and for solving problems in modern parallel and distributed software systems.

Barbara Liskov

Leads

Barbara Liskov

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Barbara Liskov

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

Supertech Research Group

We investigate the technologies that support scalable high-performance computing, including hardware, software, and theory.

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

Leads

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

Charles E. Leiserson

Neil Thompson

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

Manufacturing

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

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

20 Project Results

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

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

Transportation

Daniel Jackson

Armando Solar-Lezama

Project

Bridging Theory and Practice in Shared-Memory Parallel Algorithm Design

This project aims to design parallel algorithms for shared-memory machines that are efficient both in theory and also in practice.

Julian Shun

Leads

Julian Shun

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Julian Shun

Project

Compression and Reordering for Parallel Graph Analytics

We plan to develop a suite of graph compression and reordering techniques as part of the Ligra parallel graph processing framework to reduce space usage and improve performance of graph algorithms.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Data Civilizer

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 Warehouse Construction

Historically, DBMSs in the warehouse space partitioned their data across a shared nothing
cluster.

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Database Design

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

Entertainment

Project

High-Performance Parallel Clustering

We are designing new parallel algorithms, optimizations, and frameworks for clustering large-scale graph and geometric data.

Julian Shun

Leads

Julian Shun

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Julian Shun

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

Programming Systems Group

Impact Areas

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Project

Program Performance Prediction with Deep Learning

Commit Group

Predicting the number of clock cycles a processor takes to execute a block of assembly instructions in steady-state (the throughput) is important for both compiler designers and performance engineers.

However, building an analytical model to do so is especially complicated in modern x86-64 Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) machines with sophisticated processor microarchitectures in that it is tedious, error-prone, and must be performed from scratch for each processor generation.

Ithemal is the first tool that learns to predict the throughput of a set of instructions. It does so more accurately than state-of-the-art hand-written tools currently used in compiler backends and static machine code analyzers. In particular, Ithemal has less than half the error of state-of-the-art analytical models (LLVM's llvm-mca and Intel's IACA).

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Programming Abstractions for Dynamic Graph Analytics

We plan to develop a programming abstraction to enable programmers to write efficient parallel programs to process dynamic graphs.

Julian Shun

Leads

Julian Shun

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

Julian Shun

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

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Howard Shrobe

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

Decentralized Information Group

Impact Areas

Transportation

+10

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

Health Care

Tim Berners-Lee

Lalana Kagal

Project

Starling: Query Optimization for Cloud Services

Starling is a scalable query execution engine built on cloud function services that computes at a fine granularity, helping people more easily match workload demand.

Sam Madden

Matthew Perron

Leads

Sam Madden

Matthew Perron

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Sam Madden

Matthew Perron

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

Impact Areas

Saman Amarasinghe

Project

Video Data Querying

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

Simit: A Language for Computing on Sparse Systems

Entertainment

Transportation

Sam Madden

Favyen Bastani

24 People Results

PI
Core/Dual

Saman Amarasinghe

Professor

Compilers, architectures, software engineering

E saman@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8879

Lead

Commit Group

Tiramisu Compiler

Member

Taco: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

Halide

OpenTuner: An Extensible Framework for Program Autotuning

Program Performance Prediction with Deep Learning

Programming Systems Group

Compilers, architectures, software engineering

PI
Core/Dual

Michael Carbin

Assistant Professor

Programming languages and systems.

E mcarbin@csail.mit.edu

T 253-5881

Lead

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

Member

Programming with spaces

Program Performance Prediction with Deep Learning

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Programming languages and systems.

PI
Core/Dual

David Clark

Senior Research Scientist

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

E ddc@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6003

Lead

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Member

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

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.

Jamey Hicks

Research Affiliate

E jamey.hicks@accelerated.tech

Member

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

FSCQ: File-system verification

Systems, networks, architectures

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

Albert R. Meyer

Professor Emeritus

Programming languages, theory, complexity, online education

E meyer@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6024

Programming languages, theory, complexity, online education

PI
Core/Dual

Rob Miller

Professor

Human-computer interaction, online education, software development

E rcm@csail.mit.edu

T 324-6028

Lead

Wait-learning: Intelligent Systems for Making Productive Use of Wait Time

Usable Programming Group

CilkPride

Member

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

Human-computer interaction, online education, software development

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Graduate Student

Privacy and Big Data

E vaik@mit.edu

Lead

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

Cryptography and Information Security Group

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

PI
Core/Dual

Ronald Rivest

Institute Professor

Cryptography, cybersecurity, RSA public-key encryption

E rivest@mit.edu

T 253-5880

Lead

Member

Theory of Computation Community of Research

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

Arvind Satyanarayan

Assistant Professor

E arvindsatya@mit.edu

Lead

Visualization Group

Member

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)

Programming Abstractions for Dynamic Graph Analytics

PI
Core/Dual

Julian Shun

Assistant Professor

Parallel computing, applied algorithms, graph processing.

E jshun@mit.edu

T 258-0669

Lead

Bridging Theory and Practice in Shared-Memory Parallel Algorithm Design

High-Performance Parallel Clustering

Member

Theory of Computation Community of Research

Parallel computing, applied algorithms, graph processing.

PI
Core/Dual

Armando Solar-Lezama

Associate Professor

Programming languages, software analysis

E asolar@csail.mit.edu

T 258-9727

Lead

Synquid: Synthesis From Liquid Types

Computer-Aided Programming

An Interlock for Self Driving Cars

Member

Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)

Applied Machine Learning Community of Research

Programming languages, software analysis

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!

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Member

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Artificial intelligence, supercomputers

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

Member

Distributed Co-prime Sampling Algorithms

Web policy, cybersecurity, web architecture

Hanshen Xiao

Graduate Student

E hsxiao@MIT.EDU

Lead

Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Optimization

Victor Ying

Graduate Student

Computer architecture, parallel computing, programming models

E victory@mit.edu

Lead

Pervasive Parallelism with the Swarm Architecture

Computer architecture, parallel computing, programming models

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

FSCQ: File-system verification