In the Media

With new algorithms, data scientists could accomplish in days what has traditionally taken months.

ACM SIGMETRICS announced the selection of Professor John Tsitsiklis, Clarence Joseph LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as the recipient of the 2016 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award in recognition of his fundamental contributions to decentralized control and consensus, approximate dynamic programming and statistical learning.

New book by Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick explores how people acquired unique language skills.

Devavrat Shah, along with co-authors Vivek Farias of MIT Sloan and Srikanth Jagabathula of NYU Stern, received the Revenue Management and Pricing section prize at INFORMS, for their paper, “A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Choice with Limited Data.”

Highest award bestowed by IEEE honors exceptional contributions to the field of data communications.

Munther Dahleh, the William A. Coolidge Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will head a new Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) to be launched on July 1. Offering a range of cross-disciplinary academic programs, including a new undergraduate minor in statistics, IDSS will be home to faculty from the Engineering Systems Division (ESD), the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems(LIDS), and the current Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC). 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.

Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) research scientist Andrea Censi has paired a neuromorphic sensor with lightening speed camera data intake with a new algorithm to give robots a new enhanced sensory system. Read more.

Former associate department head and currently acting director of the Engineering Systems Division Munther Dahleh, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been appointed the interim director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), effective July 1. Dahleh is also director-designate of a new entity at MIT that will focus on complex and socio-technical systems, information and decision systems, and statistics.

Using artificial intelligence tools including probabilistic graphical models, Ying Liu, EECS graduate student working with Alan Willsky, EECS professor and director of the Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems (LIDS) has developed a technique that can efficiently infer vital information about the propagation of flight delays at U.S. airports. Liu and Willsky will present their work, which has potential application to a wide range of areas, at the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation in early December. Read more.

Faculty members in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT are converging on a wide range of research issues through game theory, which used to be a staple of economics research in the 1950s. EECS faculty members Asuman Ozdaglar, Costis Daskalakis, Munther Dahleh, and Silvio Micali discuss their approaches in this Technology Review feature. Read more.

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.