Research

System fixes bugs by importing functionality from other programs — without access to source code.

At the recent International Conference on Robotics and Automation, MIT researchers led by Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, presented a printable origami robot that folds itself up from a flat sheet of plastic when heated and measures about a centimeter from front to back. Read more.

The MIT DARPA Robotics Challenge Team led by Professor Rus Tedrake reached new heights in the June 5-6 international DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona California, as they nimbly programmed their Atlas robot to perform a wide range of tasks in one hour. The goal of the event was to develop mobile robots to perform useful tasks in disaster-relief situations — in response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Read more.

A computer vision enabled technology developed by a team of EECS faculty Bill Freeman and Frédo Durand and their students is enabling a new way to identify structural defects in objects. The group will report this latest work at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June. Read more.

EECS Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan and Associate Heads Silvio Micali and David Perreault have announced the appointments of Tamara Broderick as the ITT Career Development Assistant Professor and of Stefanie Jegelka as the X-Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor. Both Broderick and Jegelka joined the MIT EECS Department in January, 2015. Read more.

While they developed the most accurate scene recognition system, Profs. Antonio Torralba and Aude Oliva have shown how object recognition along with scene recognition could be mutually reinforcing. They will present their work at the International Conference on Learning Representations... Read more.

EECS faculty members Fredo Durand and William Freeman have teamed with Oral Buyukozturk, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, to develop an alternative technique for detecting tiny vibrations in large structures using high-speed video and computer vision techniques for magnifying motion. Read more.

MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan and Associate Department Heads Bill Freeman, Silvio Micali, and David Perreault announced in February 2015, the promotions of eight faculty members in the department. Professors Adalsteinsson, Daniel, Golland, and Torralba are promoted to full professor. Professors Chilpala, Polyanskiy and Vaikuntanathan are promoted to associate professor. The promotions are effective July 1, 2015. Read more.

Here’s one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim, and blossom like flowers. Read more.

Mapping the human genome, accomplished a decade ago, was heralded for laying the foundation for understanding genetic variation and links to a wide range of diseases. But genes can be switched on and off by many chemical modifications, aka "epigenetic marks." Now Manolis Kellis, EECS professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Broad Institute has led an NIH group that has created a similar map of the human epigenome. This work will lead to a global map towards understanding fundamental developmental and disease processes in humans. Read more.

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.