In the Media

EECS faculty members Hari Balakrishnan and Devavrat Shah with EECS graduate students Jonathan Perry, and Amy Ousterhout, and Hans Fugal of Facebook have devised a new system to reduce delay time in data center queues. Using Fastpass, the name given to the new system, the group has experimentally reduced the average queue length of routers by as much as 99.6 percent in a Facebook data center. Read more.

Three EECS faculty members were recently the recipients of major awards. Dimitri Bertsekas received the 2014 American Automatic Control Council Richard Bellman Heritage Award, Rodney Brooks received the 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award for Leadership and the 2015 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award, and Sanjoy Mitter received the 2015 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award. Read more.

Bernard Haeupler, PhD '13, has been selected by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) as recipient of the 2014 Doctoral Dissertation Award in Distributed Computing. Dr. Haeupler completed his thesis “Probabilistic Methods for Distributed Information Dissemination” in June 2013 under the co-supervision of Professors Jonathan Kelner, Muriel Médard, and David Karger at MIT.

EECS faculty members Dina Katabi, director of the Wireless Center at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and CSAIL colleague Robert Miller with EECS graduate students Fadel Adib and Zach Kabalec have collaborated to develop wireless technology to track a person's vital signals such as breathing (heart rate) and more from another room with no need for intrusive wearable technologies. Read more.

Unlike addressing the problem of object detection, a major area of research in computer vision, Prof. Bill Freeman, principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and associate department head in MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department, has worked with EECS graduate student Andrew Owens and colleagues from the University of Virginia, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Flyby Media to .... Read more.

Robert D. Blumofe and Charles E. Leiserson were announced today as the winners of the 2013 Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for contributions to robust parallel and distributed computing. The ACM credits Blumofe and Leiserson for developing provably efficient randomized “work-stealing” scheduling algorithms and Cilk, a small but powerful programming-language extension for multithreaded computing. The Kanellakis Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that significantly affect the practice of computing. Read more.

Imagine being curious enough as an 11 year old — on seeing your babysitter's mysterious calculus textbook symbols — to jump grades in order to leap several years ahead in math? Scott Aaronson, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), has always had a way of thinking beyond -- now looking for the truths in computational complexity, and consequently influencing the way computation is perceived and executed in the future. Read more.

Today, March 12, 2014, marks the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for managing general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Geneva where Berners-Lee worked at the time as a software engineer. He proposed building a distributed (global) hypertext system which he initially called "Mesh" updating it a year later to the "World Wide Web" as he wrote the code. Read more.

Srini Devadas has been selected to receive the IEEE Computer Society’s 2014 Technical Achievement Award “For pioneering work in secure hardware, including the invention of Physical Unclonable Functions and single-chip secure processor architectures.” Read more.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department graduate student Mohsen Ghaffari, also a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has developed a new way to use “vertex connectivity” that could ultimately lead to communication protocols that will allow as much network bandwidth as possible. Ghaffari and members of an international team will present this work in January at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in Portland, Oregon.

Manolis Kellis, associate professor of computer science at MIT has teamed with a former CSAIL postdoc to combine work developing algorithms that predict how strands of RNA are likely to unfold with a team of computational biologists at MIT and with experimental biologists at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to identify biologically meaningful RNA folds within living cells. Published in Nature this week, this work shows promised for understanding RNA machinery -- a major avenue towards understanding genetic and biological function in living cells.

Professor Piotr Indyk and members of his group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed an algorithm that betters his (and Prof. Dina Katabi's) work to develop a faster than fast Fourier Transform in 2012. The new algorithm that uses the minimum possible number of samples to analyze signals has the potential to allow advances in medical devices such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machines to scan patients.