Research

Impact Areas

Lead

David Clark

Karen Sollins

David Clark

Karen Sollins

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.

+23

Leads

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

+23

Research Group

Data Systems Group

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

+16

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

+16

Research Group

Lecturers

Lecturers in CSAIL

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

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

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

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

Graphics & Vision

Impact Areas

Lead

Martin Rinard

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

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

+21

Sam Madden

9 Project Results matching all criteria

Project

Securing IoT

Cognitive AI Community of Research

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

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.

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Leads

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Project

Denial of Service Mitigation through Protocol Design

Computing & Society Community of Research

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

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

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

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Practical Secure Computation

Our goal is to bridge theory and practice to create infrastructure that allow computation and multi-party computation without compromising privacy.

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Leads

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Research Areas

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Project

Return of the Byzantine Generals

This project studies new solutions to the Byzantine General Problem and its applications in distributed systems and cryptography.

Srini Devadas

Leads

Srini Devadas

Research Areas

Srini Devadas

Project

Scaling strong anonymity

Our goal is to provide provable and practical anonymity to a large number of users online.

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Leads

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Research Areas

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Project

Vuvuzela: Metadata private messaging

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

David Lazar

Nickolai Zeldovich

Leads

David Lazar

Nickolai Zeldovich

Research Areas

Impact Areas

David Lazar

Nickolai Zeldovich

5 News Results matching all criteria

Computing & Health Security & Cryptography Systems & Networking Health Care

April 09 '20

Automated Covid-19 contact tracing - while preserving privacy

New system uses Bluetooth signals from your smartphone, with the goal of automating Covid-19 contact tracing while preserving privacy

Automated Covid-19 contact tracing - while preserving privacy

Algorithms & Theory Computing & Health Computational Biology Computer Architecture Graphics & Vision Human-Computer Interaction Programming Languages & Software Engineering Robotics Security & Cryptography Systems & Networking Cybersecurity Education Energy Entertainment Health Care Manufacturing Transportation Wireless

June 27 '19

CSAIL hosts first-ever TEDxMIT

Speakers — all women — discuss everything from gravitational waves to robot nurses

CSAIL hosts first-ever TEDxMIT

New untraceable text-messaging system comes with statistical guarantees.

Security & Cryptography Systems & Networking Cybersecurity

December 07 '15

Untraceable text messages - guaranteed

Anonymity networks, which sit on top of the public Internet, are designed to conceal people’s Web-browsing habits from prying eyes. The most popular of these, Tor, has been around for more than a decade and is used by millions of people every day.

Untraceable text messages - guaranteed

How artificial intelligence can be used to sift through thousands of pages of tax law to root out shady tax-shelters.

Computing & Health Security & Cryptography Systems & Networking Big Data Cybersecurity

October 17 '15

Tax-evading corporations, watch out: our AI knows what you're doing

CSAIL researchers recently helped develop "STEALTH," a system that uses artificial intelligence to combat tax evasion by corporations.

Tax-evading corporations, watch out: our AI knows what you're doing

Formally verified working file system could lead to computers guaranteed never to lose your data.

Security & Cryptography Systems & Networking Cybersecurity

August 24 '15

Crash-proof computer systems

In a computer operating system, the file system is the part that writes data to disk and tracks where the data is stored. If the computer crashes while it’s writing data, the file system’s records can become corrupt. Hours of work could be lost, or programs could stop working properly.At a symposium this fall, MIT researchers will present the first file system that is mathematically guaranteed not to lose track of data during crashes. Although the file system is slow by today’s standards, the techniques the researchers used to verify its performance can be extended to more sophisticated designs. Ultimately, formal verification could make it much easier to develop reliable, efficient file systems.

Crash-proof computer systems

26 Group Results

Research Group

Advanced Network Architecture Group

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Leads

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Research Areas

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

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

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.

+23

Leads

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

+23

Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

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.

+16

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

+16

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 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

Internet of Things

Lead

Hal Abelson

Research Group

Multicore Algorithmics

We develop techniques for designing, implementing, and reasoning about multiprocessor algorithms, in particular concurrent data structures for multicore machines and the mathematical foundations of the computation models that govern their behavior.

Nir Shavit

Leads

Nir Shavit

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Energy

Lead

Nir Shavit

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

Internet of Things

Lead

Dina Katabi

Research Group

Networks and Mobile Systems

We conduct research in many areas of networking: wireless networks, Internet architecture and protocols, overlay and peer-to-peer networks, sensor networks, network security, and networked systems.

Mohammad Alizadeh

Hari Balakrishnan

Leads

Mohammad Alizadeh

Hari Balakrishnan

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Mohammad Alizadeh

Hari Balakrishnan

Mohammad Alizadeh

Hari Balakrishnan

Research Group

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

We at PDOS build and investigate software systems for parallel and distributed environments.

Leads

Frans Kaashoek

Robert Morris

Nickolai Zeldovich

Adam Belay

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Frans Kaashoek

Robert Morris

Nickolai Zeldovich

Adam Belay

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

+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.

+21

Costis Daskalakis

Leads

Costis Daskalakis

Research Areas

Computational Biology

Impact Areas

Lead

Costis Daskalakis

+21

Costis Daskalakis

Research Group

Tidor Lab

We focus on the analysis of complex biological systems at both the molecular level and the systems level.

Bruce Tidor

Leads

Bruce Tidor

Research Areas

Computational Biology

Impact Areas

Health Care

Lead

Bruce Tidor

Research Group

Usable Programming Group

We design and study systems that improve the learnability, efficiency, and safety of software development.

Rob Miller

Leads

Rob Miller

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Rob Miller

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

Graphics & Vision

Impact Areas

Lead

Martin Rinard

63 Project Results

Project

[Inactive] T-1000: A Thousand-Core Coherent Shared Memory System

(This project is no longer active.) The T-1000, a prototype system of a thousand realistic processors embedded throughout an ensemble of interconnected FPGAs, seeks to demonstrate the scalability of timestamp-based cache coherence protocols on distributed shared memory systems.

Quan Nguyen

Leads

Quan Nguyen

Research Areas

Quan Nguyen

Project

A new way of handling all-to-all broadcast

We design a new all-to-all broadcasts scheme with significantly less communication cost using aggregate signatures.

Alin Tomescu

Jun Wan

Leads

Jun Wan

Research Areas

Alin Tomescu

Jun Wan

Project

AdaptDB: Adaptive Partitioning for Distributed Joins

Our goal is to develop an adaptive storage manager for analytical database workloads in a distributed setting. It works by partitioning datasets across a cluster and incrementally refining data partitioning as queries are run.

Yi Lu

Leads

Yi Lu

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Yi Lu

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

Networks and Mobile Systems

Una-May O'Reilly

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

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Amoeba: A shape changing storage system for big data

Amoeba is a distributed storage system that efficiently supports ad-hoc and exploratory analytics using adaptive data partitioning

Alekh Jindal

Anil Shanbhag

Leads

Anil Shanbhag

Research Areas

Computer-Aided Programming

Alekh Jindal

Anil Shanbhag

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

Approximate String Joins with Abbreviations

We propose efficient and effective algorithms to perform approximate string joins with abbreviations in database systems.

Wenbo Tao

Leads

Wenbo Tao

Research Areas

Natural Language Processing Group

Wenbo Tao

Project

Aspect-Augmented Adversarial Networks for Domain Adaptation

Vertical AI Community of Research

We propose a novel aspect-augmented adversarial network for cross-aspect and cross-domain adaptation tasks. The effectiveness of our approach suggests the potential application of adversarial networks to a broader range of NLP tasks for improved representation learning, such as machine translation and language generation.

Regina Barzilay

Tommi Jaakkola

Leads

Regina Barzilay

Tommi Jaakkola

Research Areas

Regina Barzilay

Tommi Jaakkola

Project

Aurum: Large Scale Data Discovery

Aurum is a data discovery system that works at large scale, helping people find relevant data.

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Model-Based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Automated Attack Tree Generation for Critical Infrastructure

Cognitive AI Community of Research

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

Cryptography and Information Security Group

Howard Shrobe

Project

Basing Cryptography on Structured Hardness

Theory of Computation Community of Research

We aim to base a variety of cryptographic primitives on complexity theoretic assumptions. We focus on the assumption that there exist highly structured problems --- admitting so called "zero-knowledge" protocols --- that are nevertheless hard to compute

Leads

Research Areas

Distributed Robotics Laboratory

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

Project

BlueDBM: Distributed Flash Storage for Big Data Analytics

BlueDBM is an architecture of computer clusters consisting of fast distributed flash storage and in-storage accelerators, which often outperforms larger and more expensive clusters in applications such as graph analytics.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

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

Building a Scalable Database for Autonomous Vehicles

We are building a database for autonomous vehicle sensor data that addresses the challenges presented by the potential scale of autonomous vehicle data and the unique characteristics of the data.

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Oscar Ricardo Moll Thomae

Research Areas

Decentralized Information Group

Project

The Car Can Explain!

Cognitive AI Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

Developing techniques to allow self-driving cars and other AI-driven systems to explain behaviors and failures.

Leads

Gerald Sussman

Lalana Kagal

Leilani Gilpin

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Health Care

Project

Chameleon: Using Machine Learning to Make Databases Faster!

Our goal is to build a database framework in which the database predicts user queries and builds indexes in advance to allow future queries to run faster.

Leads

Albert Kim

Sam Madden

Aditya Parameswaran

Research Areas

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 Discovery

As part of Data Civilizer we are designing abstractions and building tools and systems to help people with their data-related tasks, from discovering, to cleaning, to transforming it. The aim is to shape the data in a way that is easy to analyzer---for example to fit a model or fill in a report.

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Cryptography and Information Security Group

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Data Garbling: Computing on Encrypted Data

Theory of Computation Community of Research

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

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

3 People Results

Ryan Marcus

Postdoctoral Associate

Machine learning for systems

E ryanmarcus@csail.mit.edu

Member