Research

  • Impact Areas
  • Research Areas

Algorithms & Theory

Foundational work that includes complexity, parallel computing and game theory

AI & ML

Spanning natural language processing, deep-learning, computer vision and more

Computational Biology

Understanding disease via epigenomics, gene regulation and bioinformatics

Computer Architecture

How CPUs, memory and other systems are designed and organized

Graphics & Vision

Teaching computers to interpret, create and animate visual data

Human-Computer Interaction

Software and hardware that let us naturally interact with technology

Programming Languages & Software Engineering

From compilers and verification to software design and engineering

Robotics

Vision, actuation, sensing and manipulation of machines

Security & Cryptography

Developing technologies to prevent and recover from cyber-attacks

Systems & Networking

From distributed systems and databases to wireless

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16 Group Results

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.
Abelson
Berners-Lee
Brewer-headshot
+8
Weitzner

Daniel Weitzner

Leads

Weitzner

Daniel Weitzner

Research Areas

Algorithms & Theory
AI & ML
Human-Computer Interaction
Security & Cryptography
Systems & Networking

Impact Areas

Big Data
Cybersecurity
Health Care
Internet of Things
Transportation
Wireless

Lead

Weitzner

Daniel Weitzner

Abelson
Berners-Lee
Brewer-headshot
+8
 
Weitzner

Daniel Weitzner

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.
default headshot
default headshot
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+2

Leads

Weitzner

Daniel Weitzner

Abelson

Hal Abelson

Clark

David Clark

Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Gerald Sussman

Research Areas

AI & ML
Human-Computer Interaction
Security & Cryptography

Impact Areas

Big Data
Cybersecurity
Internet of Things
Transportation

Lead

Weitzner

Daniel Weitzner

Abelson

Hal Abelson

Clark

David Clark

Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Gerald Sussman

default headshot
default headshot
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+2

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.
Alizadeh-headshot
Arvind
Hari Balakrishnan
+21
Madden

Sam Madden

Leads

Madden

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Computer Architecture
Programming Languages & Software Engineering
Security & Cryptography
Systems & Networking

Impact Areas

Big Data
Cybersecurity
Internet of Things
Transportation
Wireless

Lead

Madden

Sam Madden

Alizadeh-headshot
Arvind
Hari Balakrishnan
+21
 
Madden

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.
Amarasinghe
Regina Barzilay
Broderick-headshot
+7
Rinard

Martin Rinard

Leads

Rinard

Martin Rinard

Research Areas

Algorithms & Theory
AI & ML
Graphics & Vision
Programming Languages & Software Engineering
Security & Cryptography
Systems & Networking

Impact Areas

Big Data
Cybersecurity
Health Care
Internet of Things
Transportation
Wireless

Lead

Rinard

Martin Rinard

Amarasinghe
Regina Barzilay
Broderick-headshot
+7
 
Rinard

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

Ted Adelson

Durand

Fredo Durand

John W. Fisher III

John Fisher

Freeman

William Freeman

Polina Golland

Polina Golland

Grimson

Eric Grimson

Horn

Berthold Horn

oliva-headshot

Aude Oliva

Torralba

Antonio Torralba

Research Areas

AI & ML
Graphics & Vision

Impact Areas

Entertainment
Health Care
Transportation

Lead

Ted Adelson

Ted Adelson

Durand

Fredo Durand

John W. Fisher III

John Fisher

Freeman

William Freeman

Polina Golland

Polina Golland

Grimson

Eric Grimson

Horn

Berthold Horn

oliva-headshot

Aude Oliva

Torralba

Antonio Torralba

14 Project Results

Project

Active Learning of Models for Planning

Learning and Intelligent Systems
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.
Kaelbling

Leslie Kaelbling

Lozano-Perez

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Leads

Kaelbling

Leslie Kaelbling

Lozano-Perez

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Research Areas

Algorithms & Theory
AI & ML
Human-Computer Interaction
Robotics

Impact Areas

Big Data
Education
Entertainment
 
Kaelbling

Leslie Kaelbling

Lozano-Perez

Tomas Lozano-Perez

Project

Automatic Speech Recognition

Spoken Language Systems Group
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.
MIT CSAIL Spoken Language Systems PhD student

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

Jim Glass

Leads

MIT CSAIL Spoken Language Systems PhD student

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

Jim Glass

Research Areas

AI & ML
Human-Computer Interaction

Impact Areas

Big Data
Education
Entertainment
Health Care
Internet of Things
 
MIT CSAIL Spoken Language Systems PhD student

Sameer Khurana

Jim Glass

Jim Glass

Project

CliNER: Clinical Concept Extraction

Cognitive AI Community of Research
Applied Machine Learning Community of Research
Clinical concept extraction (CCE) of named entities - such as problems, tests, and treatments - aids in forming an understanding of notes and provides a foundation for many downstream clinical decision-making tasks. Historically, this task has been posed as a standard named entity recognition (NER) sequence tagging problem, and solved with feature-based methods using hand-engineered domain knowledge. Recent advances, however, have demonstrated the efficacy of LSTM-based models for NER tasks, including CCE. This work presents CliNER 2.0, a simple-to-install, open-source tool for extracting concepts from clinical text. CliNER 2.0 uses a word- and character- level LSTM model, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. For ease of use, the tool also includes pre-trained models available for public use.

Leads

Willie

William Boag

Elena Sergeeva

Elena Sergeeva

Szolovits

Peter Szolovits

default headshot

Anna Rumshisky

Research Areas

AI & ML

Impact Areas

Energy

Project

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

Decentralized Information Group
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.
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default headshot
Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Leads

Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Research Areas

AI & ML
Security & Cryptography

Impact Areas

Big Data
Cybersecurity
Education
Energy
Entertainment
Health Care
Internet of Things
Manufacturing
Transportation
default headshot
default headshot
 
Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Project

Solid: Social Linked Data

Decentralized Information Group
Cognitive AI Community of Research
Computing & Society Community of Research
Solid aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.
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Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Leads

Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Research Areas

Programming Languages & Software Engineering
Systems & Networking

Impact Areas

Cybersecurity
Health Care
Internet of Things
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Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Kagal-headshot

Lalana Kagal

Project

Toward Using Virtual Identities in Computer Science Learning for Broadening Participation

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)
Our research seeks to discover best practices for using avatars to enhance performance, engagement, and STEM identity development for diverse public middle and high school computer science students. As sites of our research we run workshops in which students learn computer science in fun, relevant ways, and develop self-images as computer scientists.
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Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell

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Aziria Rodriguez

+1
Fox 1

D. Fox Harrell

Leads

Fox 1

D. Fox Harrell

Research Areas

AI & ML

Impact Areas

Education
Entertainment
default headshot

Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell

default headshot
default headshot

Aziria Rodriguez

+1
 
Fox 1

D. Fox Harrell

20 People Results

R. David Edelman - Headshot

R. David Edelman

Director, Project on Technology, Economy & National Security
Machine learning, cybersecurity, governance
R. David Edelman - Headshot
T 258-6389
Machine learning, cybersecurity, governance
Gregory Falco

Gregory Falco

Research Affiliate
Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.
Gregory Falco
Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.
Freeman

PI
Core/Dual

William Freeman

Professor
Vision, machine learning, Bayesian modeling
Freeman
T 253-8828
RM 32-D476

Lead

Vision Group
Computer Graphics Group
Visual Computing Community of Research

Member

Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network
Visual Dynamics: Probabilistic Future Frame Synthesis via Cross Convolutional Networks
Learning the Arrow of Time from Videos
3D Generative Adversarial Networks
Embodied Intelligence Community of Research
Vision, machine learning, Bayesian modeling
Jim Glass

PI
Core/Dual

Jim Glass

Senior Research Scientist
speech and language processing
Jim Glass
T 253-1640
RM 32-G444

Lead

Spoken Language Systems Group
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
Karger

PI
Core/Dual

David Karger

Professor
Helping people manage information
Karger
T 258-6167
RM 32-G592

Lead

Haystack Group
Human-Computer Interaction
Algorithms Group
Mavo: Creating Interactive Data-Driven Web Applications by Authoring HTML
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
Madden

PI
Core/Dual

Sam Madden

Professor
Systems for processing and manipulating data
Madden
T 258-6643
RM 32-G938

Lead

Data Systems Group
Aurum: Large Scale Data Discovery
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
solomon-headshot

PI
Core/Dual

Justin Solomon

Assistant Professor
Geometry, graphics, vision, machine learning, optimization.
solomon-headshot
RM 32-D460

Lead

Computer Graphics Group
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

Visual Computing Community of Research
Geometry, graphics, vision, machine learning, optimization.
Torralba

PI
Core/Dual

Antonio Torralba

Professor
Vision, graphics, perception, machine learning
Torralba
T 324-0900
RM 32-386G

Lead

Vision Group
Understanding Light via Deep Neural Networks
Understandable Deep Networks
Understanding Food images

Member

Predictive Vision
Where Are They Looking?
Single-Image 3D Interpreter Network
VirtualHome: Representing Activities as Programs
Places Database for Scene Recognition
Semantic Scene Understanding through ADE20K dataset
Crossing the Vision-Language Boundary
Center for Deployable Machine Learning (CDML)
Visual Computing Community of Research
Embodied Intelligence Community of Research
Vision, graphics, perception, machine learning

23 News Results

F. Harrell
AI & ML Programming Languages & Software Engineering Education Entertainment

3Q: D. Fox Harrell on his video game for the #MeToo era

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.

3Q: D. Fox Harrell on his video game for the #MeToo era

PhD student Danielle Olson believes we can make digital information-sharing more natural and interpersonal, by creating immersive media to better understand each other’s feelings and backgrounds.
AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Entertainment

Danielle Olson: Building empathy through computer science and art

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.

Danielle Olson: Building empathy through computer science and art

System directs camera-equipped drones to maintain framing of an aerial shot.
Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Graphics & Vision Robotics Entertainment Transportation

Cinematography on the fly

In recent years, a host of Hollywood blockbusters — including “The Fast and the Furious 7,” “Jurassic World,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” — have included aerial tracking shots provided by drone helicopters outfitted with cameras. Those shots required separate operators for the drones and the cameras, and careful planning to avoid collisions. But a team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and ETH Zurich hope to make drone cinematography more accessible, simple, and reliable.

Cinematography on the fly

WaitSuite opens up new possibilities for "micro-learning," leveraging idle moments like when you're waiting to connect to WiFi or refresh your email.
AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Education Internet of Things

Learn a language while you wait for WiFi

Hyper-connectivity has changed the way we communicate, wait, and productively use our time. Even in a world of 5G wireless and “instant” messaging, there are countless moments throughout the day when we’re waiting for messages, texts, and Snapchats to refresh. But our frustrations with waiting a few extra seconds for our emails to push through doesn’t mean we have to simply stand by.

Learn a language while you wait for WiFi

At the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present a new system for allocating bandwidth in data center networks.
Systems & Networking Internet of Things Wireless

Faster page loads

A webpage today is often the sum of many different components. A user’s home page on a social-networking site, for instance, might display the latest posts from the users’ friends; the associated images, links, and comments; notifications of pending messages and comments on the user’s own posts; a list of events; a list of topics currently driving online discussions; a list of games, some of which are flagged to indicate that it’s the user’s turn; and of course the all-important ads, which the site depends on for revenues.

Faster page loads

Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories have built a low-power chip specialized for automatic speech recognition. With power savings of 90 to 99 percent, it could make voice control practical for relatively simple electronic devices.
AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Energy Internet of Things Manufacturing

Voice control everywhere

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.

Voice control everywhere

System that learns to distinguish words’ phonemes could aid development of speech-processing systems for under-studied languages
AI & ML Human-Computer Interaction Big Data Education Entertainment Internet of Things

Learning spoken language

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.

Learning spoken language

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares
Algorithms & Theory AI & ML Systems & Networking Big Data Energy

What better wind-speed prediction can do for the energy industry

When a power company wants to build a new wind farm, it generally hires a consultant to make wind speed measurements at the proposed site for eight to 12 months. Those measurements are correlated with historical data and used to assess the site’s power-generation capacity.This month CSAIL researchers will present a new statistical technique that yields better wind-speed predictions than existing techniques do — even when it uses only three months’ worth of data. That could save power companies time and money, particularly in the evaluation of sites for offshore wind farms, where maintaining measurement stations is particularly costly.

What better wind-speed prediction can do for the energy industry