Research

This year the Dan David Foundation International Board has selected Marvin Minsky to receive the Dan David Foundation Prize for the Future Time Dimension titled “Artificial Intelligence: The Digital Mind. Prof. Minsky was selected as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. He is cited as among the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century in a variety of disciplines, including AI, robotics, computation, learning, cognition, philosophy and optics. Read more.

Marvin Minsky, a faculty member in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1958 and co-founder (in 1959) of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), has been recognized the the BBVA Foundation for his lifetime achievements in establishing the field of artificial intelligence as well as his contributions to mathematics, cognitive science, robotics and philosophy.

Professor Alan Willsky, has been selected to receive the 2013 SPS Society Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). Willsky is the Edwin Sibley Webster professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Read more.

At this month’s IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems, Berthold Horn, professor of computer science and engineering in the EECS Department at MIT and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), presented a new algorithm for alleviating traffic flow instabilities, which he believes could be implemented by a variation of the adaptive cruise-control systems that are an option on many of today’s high-end cars. 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.”