Research

In a paper appearing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Robotics Research, Professors and member of the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano Perez and EECS graduate student Lawson Wong show that a system using an off-the-shelf algorithm to aggregate different perspectives can recognize four times as many objects as one that uses a single perspective, while reducing the number of misidentifications. Read more.

Adam Chilpala, principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Douglas Ross Career Development Professor of Software Technology has developed a new programming language called Ur/Web that promises to take the drudgery out of Web development. Read more.

CSAIL postdoc and member of the MIT Computational Biology Group, Andreas Pfenning and collaborators at Duke University have reported findings on large data studies comparing song bird genomics with humans and primates. Vocal-learning birds and primates have common genes that could help pinpoint genetic disorders in humans such as stuttering or Huntington's Disease. Read more.

A new cybersecurity center made possible by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will focus on cyber security policy -- one of three new academic initiatives (also at Stanford and UC Berkeley) aimed at laying the foundations for smart, sustainable policy to deal with the growing global cyber threats. Read more.

Rodney Brooks, Founder, Chairman, CTO of Rethink Robotics and Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT, has spent his life creating intelligent machines that do our bidding. Read more about him and why he fears there will not be enough workforce robots in the future.

Three 2014-2015 Faculty Research Innovation Fellowships (FRIF) were announced on Oct. 7. 2014. The FRIF was established in 2011 to recognize mid-career EECS faculty members for outstanding research contributions and international leadership in their fields. Read more.

Principal investigator in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab Charles E. Leiserson is the recipient of the ACM/IEEE Computer Society 2014 Ken Kennedy Award, in recognition of his important impact on parallel computing systems. Read more.

A team led by Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) researchers including EECS associate professor Wojciech Matusik and project lead and doctoral candidate Adriana Schulz has developed “Fab By Example,” the first data-driven method to help people design products, with a growing database of templates that allow users to customize thousands of complex items — without the need to understand the mechanical engineering that might normally be expected. The team will be presenting its system at this month’s Siggraph graphics conference. Read more.

Paying attention to the data that says MOOC learning is limited because of high drop rates and other negatives, CSAIL researchers have noted that students need help learning how to watch the videos and these researchers have developed a new way for students to learn how to watch MOOC videos called LectureScape. Read more.

Light is everything to good photography. Knowing this fact well, EECS professor Fredo Durand, also an experienced photographer, has begun to create a new system that uses drones (light-equipped autonomous robots) to create accurate lighting while communicating with the camera-mounted interface. Durand and several other researchers will report on their work at an upcoming international symposium in August.

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.