Research

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.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has elected EECS professors Rodney Brooks and David Perreault to IEEE Fellow status. Professors Brooks and Perreault are among a class of 297 selected for the class of 2013 IEEE Fellows.

Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and computer science student Kang Zhang have developed a crowd sourcing system that has analyzed the tweets of roughly 10 million U.S. voters as the national election came and went. 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...