In the Media

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.

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).

Erik Demaine, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the MIT EECS Department and principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), has been honored with the 2013 European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) Presburger Award for young scientists. Prof. Demaine was selected for his “outstanding contributions in several fields of algorithms, namely computational geometry, data structures, graph algorithms and recreational algorithms,” according to the EATCS website. “His work has shown promising applications to computer graphics, sensor networks, molecular biology, programmable matter, and manufacturing and engineering.”

Researchers in the lab of Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, including Rahul Rithe, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, have developed a chip which can perform professional quality enhancements of photographs quickly and without draining power on smartphone and digital cameras--cutting out the need for added energy- and time-consuming computational photography systems.

In a spotlight for the MIT News Office, Devavrat Shah describes his choice to become a professor of electrical engineering and computer science after a brief foray (while he was a graduate student at Stanford in 1999) at a startup where he found the stimulation of contributing 1% inspiration time was diluted by 99% execution effort. Read more...

In an effort to bring a more human dimension to the online education experience, MIT Professor Rob Miller and EECS graduate students Mason Tang and Elena Tatarchenko have developed a new computer system that will help provide students with feedback on their homework assignments and create more interaction between students, teachers, and alumni.