In the Media

A team from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) including Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin, and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering have used indium gallium arsenide to build nanometer-sized metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) that can outpace silicon providing the smallest non-silicon transistors yet.

EECS faculty member Erik Demaine, professor of computer science at MIT, and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has teamed with members of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms to develop a new kind of robotic device that mimics nature's folding of proteins to allow for all kinds of possible functionality.

Read the Nov. 16, 2012 MIT News Office article by Larry Hardesty titled "Department snapshot: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.EECS places renewed emphasis on interdisciplinary research, partnerships with alumni and industry, and experiential learning," includes a visual glimpse of the EECS Department as well.

Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston, who earned his undergraduate degree in computer science at MIT in 2005 and teamed with then EECS undergraduate student Arash Ferdowsi to found the company, will be the MIT June 7, 2013 Commencement speaker. "I’ve had some of the most formative experiences of my life at MIT,” Houston says. “It’s where Dropbox started and where I met my co-founder, Arash, so it’s an honor to come back and share my story. Technology is at the heart of how we shape our future and confront our challenges, and more than ever the world needs MIT graduates to lead us forward.”

Gregory Wornell, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) has teamed with former RLE member Dr. Maryam Shanechi, who has recently earned her doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Prof. Emery Brown of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, and neurosurgeon Dr. Ziv Williams at Massachusetts General Hospital to develop the first instance of an "intelligent" Brain-Motor Interface, which uses specially designed advanced neural decoding algorithms to decode in advance a sequence of planned movements from neural activity in the premotor cortex.

Anantha Chandrakasan, EECS Department Head, and two of his students in the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) have joined a team of researchers from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) to show that a natural battery in the mammalian inner ear can power an implantable electronic device. Read more...

At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT on November 8-9, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student Stanislav Nikolov, will present a new algorithm that can, with 95 percent accuracy, predict which topics will trend an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the list — and sometimes as much as four or five hours before. Read more...

Muriel Médard, professor of electrical engineering in the EECS Department at MIT and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) has led a team to develop a new way to guarantee more reliable wireless reception. The team has improved wireless bandwidth tenfold by eliminating resending of dropped packets of data, often the source of network clogging. Read more in the Oct. 23, 2012 Technology Review article by David Talbot titled "A Bandwidth Breakthrough. A dash of algebra on wireless networks promises to boost bandwidth tenfold, without new infrastructure."

A new center at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) called Wireless@MIT was launched Oct. 11, 2012. The new center, involving more than 50 MIT faculty members, research staff and graduate students and co-directed by Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department faculty members Dina Katabi and Hari Balakrishnan, will work toward addressing three critical areas of need facing the exploding use wireless communication -- the spectrum crisis, power supply issues, and creating new application solutions for smoother and consistent service. Read more...

Members of the Signal Transformation and Information Representation (STIR) Group at RLE including EECS graduate student John Sun, Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) principal research scientist and head of STIR, Vivek Goyal, and two former members of the group, have used the techniques of information theory to demonstrate that humans tend naturally to think logarithmically rather than linearly as a way of reducing error. They have reported their findings to the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.

3D microenvironmental structures for allowing replication of the intricate organization of living cell types have been developed and reported by Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) graduate student and lead author of the work Halil Tekin as well as several undergraduate students in EECS.