• Building an effective Photovoltaic cell (PV) that both collects enough solar energy and carries the charge efficiently has held back the use of quantum dots despite their relative ease of production. Now a multi-disciplinary team involving researchers from the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the MIT Materials Science and Engineering and the MIT Chemistry Departments has designed a way to allow quick extraction of charge yet enough depth for absorption of energy to provide a 50 percent boost in the current generated by the solar cell, and a 35 percent increase in overall efficiency.
  • Professor Peter Szolovits has been named the recipient of the 2013 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence. The award is presented annually by the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in honor of Morris F. Collen, a pioneer in the field. According to the ACMI, the award is the "highest honor in informatics that is presented by the American College of Medical Informatics to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to biomedical informatics has made a lasting impression on healthcare and biomedicine.”
  • Professor Russ Tedrake and members of his research group, the Robot Locomotion Group, have tackled a difficult problem in robotics: how to mathematically allow for all instances of robot limbs touching (or striking) another surface in conjunction with free space motions. Tedrake and members of his group will be presenting their work in April at the Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control conference. The paper titled "A Direct Method for Trajectory Optimization of Rigid Bodies Through Contact" has been short listed for the best paper category.
  • Researchers in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) working with a colleague at Georgia Tech have shown in a paper titled " Optimization of Lyapunov Invariants in Verification of Software Systems" in the latest issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, that principles from control theory can be applied to computer software to improve software verification.
  • The Royal Academy of Engineering has announced that Tim Berners-Lee, the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering at MIT, has been named one of the winners of the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his work in creating the World Wide Web. The award honored Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn and Louis Pouzin for "outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world and benefited humanity.”
  • Professor Rob Miller is one of four MIT faculty selected as 2013 MacVicar Faculty Fellow for outstanding undergraduate teaching, mentoring and educational innovation. One recommender wrote: “I think Rob embodies the ideal of an MIT teacher — caring, engaging, tirelessly working on behalf of the students, eliciting respect, admiration, and joy from the students.”
  • MIT professors Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali have won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for their pioneering work in the fields of cryptography and complexity theory. Essentially laying the foundation for modern cryptography by formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, the two have turned cryptography from an art into science -- and, in the process provided the basis for securing today's communications protocols, Internet transactions and cloud computing. They also made fundamental advances in the theory of computational complexity, an area that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty.
  • Researchers working with EECS faculty member and CSAIL principal investigator Samuel Madden, are developing a new system called DBSeer to address the realities of cloud computing -- particularly database applications requiring over expenditure for hardware. In June, Professor Madden and members of the MIT Database Group including first author of two papers on this work, postdoctoral associate Barzan Mozafari will present their work at the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD).
  • In a "fireside" chat forum, Wireless@MIT co-directors and professors in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Dina Katabi and Hari Balakrishnan discussed spectrum and wireless policies with US Federal Communications Commission head Julius Genachowski at the Kirsch Auditorium in the Stata Center, Thursday, March 7, 2013.
  • "In our heads it's like a big world of small motions out there." Bill Freeman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate department head of the Electrical Engineeering and Computer Science Department at MIT describes in a NY Times video his software that enables video magification to see what we can't normally see but might like to.