Research

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.

Professor Qing Hu and graduate students in his research group, the Millimeter-wave and Terahertz Devices Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and researchers from several outside research labs have published their breakthrough research on terahertz laser frequency combs, and are featured as the cover story of the June 2014 issue of Nature Photonics (June 2014, Volume 8 No 6). This research has applications from cancer detection to explosives sensing. Read more about this research on the RLE website.

The potential for multicore computing on a chip has gained new traction with the work by MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department faculty member Li-Shiuan Peh and EECS graduate student Bhavya Daya as they present a new 36-core chip on which each core acts as a mini Internet using a router to complete a communication network for data transport, while keeping local data up to date. Read more.

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.

Sangeeta Bhatia, was interviewed recently by Jeremey Hobson on Boston NPR radio station WBUR's noon news program "Here and Now" about her work creating miniature livers for testing drugs. Listen to the podcast.

EECS faculty member, Robert Berwick, principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) has teamed with MIT Linguistics and Philosophy professor Shigeru Miyagawa to reinforce the thesis that human language development is based on bird song and other primates communication. 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.

Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology and associate dean for innovation in MIT’s School of Engineering, with MIT professor of chemistry Moungi Bawendi and graduate students Chia-Hao Chuang and Patrick Brown have developed new quantum dot photovoltaic cells that demonstrate significant efficiency in solar cells with no need for high temperature or vacuum conditions to operate -- or to be produced. 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.

Marc Baldo, MIT professor of electrical engineering has teamed with MIT’s Troy Van Voorhis, professor of chemistry and other researchers to understand the theory behind singlet excitonic fission -- a process by which extra electrons are produced by incoming photonic energy -- first observed in the 1960s. This new understanding of what materials will generate this added energy has potential for creating solar cells that demonstratew up to 25 per cent increased efficiency. Read more.