In the Media

At the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition this month, EECS faculty member and associate department head William Freeman and colleagues from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) will present a new algorithm that can, with roughly 80 percent accuracy, determine whether a given snippet of video is playing backward or forward. Read more.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) held a two day conference celebrating 50 years of computer science looking forward to the future with solutions for today's obstacles and tomorrow's solutions. Read more.

Prof. Daniela Rus, Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and head of the Distributed Robotics Lab (DRL) envisions new ways for design and manufacture of robots — including the potential for one robot per child in schools. She and members from the DRL group received multiple prizes at the Ultra-Affordable Robot competition particularly for the group's printable, origami-inspired Segway robot, called SEG, which won first place.

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab's Leslie Kaelbling, the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in collaboration with members of her research group the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group have developed a new way to use "multiagent systems" to allow for teams of robots to accomplish tasks requiring flexibility and communication in uncertain environments. Read more.

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's (CSAIL) Aude Oliva, associate professor of cognitive science at MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences working with her CSAIL colleagues including Antonio Torralba, associate professor in MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and also a member of in the MIT Computer Vision Group has developed an algorithm to slightly modify a person's face — making it more memorable without altering that person's overall appearance.

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.

Self-assembling robots were dismissed even by Daniela Rus, professor of computer science and engineering and director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), until she worked again with former MIT EECS senior John Romanishin, now a research scientist in CSAIL and the one who was convinced (since his undergraduate days) that it could be done. They will present their work on the new self-propelled robots at the IEEE RSJ International conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Read more.

Three CSAIL roboticists have been named to IEEE Intelligent Systems' 2013 list of "AI's 10 to Watch", which celebrates 10 rising stars in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The CSAIL members named to the list are: Nora Ayanian, Finale Doshi-Velez and Stefanie Tellex.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) announced on July 25, 2013 that Professor William Freeman has been honored with the Test of Time Award for his paper "Orientation Histograms for Hand Gesture Recognition,” co-written by Michal Roth in 1995. The award was presented at the 2013 IEEE Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition Conference in Shanghai, China.

Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and members of the Computational Structures Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a new system that not only disguises a server's memory-access patterns, but also prevents attacks that rely on how long computations take.

Building tomorrow's robots that can handle changing environments and unknowns will require designing a system that constantly calculates these uncertainties. EECS professors and principal investigators with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano Perez have recently submitted their work on this area of artificial intelligence for publication in the International Journal of Robotics Research.

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.