Research

Five members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of a total of eight MIT faculty have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering including Hari Balakrishnan, Sangeeta Bhatia, Anantha Chandrakasan, L. Rafael Reif and Daniela Rus. Read more.

Professor Muriel Medard working with EECS graduate student Flavio du Pin Calmon and researchers from Maynooth University in Ireland have shown that since existing practical cryptographic schemes demonstrate elements of information-theoretic security thereby preventing extraction of some of their data — it is possible to calculate minimum-security guarantees for any given encryption scheme — enabling information managers to make more informed decisions about how to protect data. 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.

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.

Unlike addressing the problem of object detection, a major area of research in computer vision, Prof. Bill Freeman, principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and associate department head in MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department, has worked with EECS graduate student Andrew Owens and colleagues from the University of Virginia, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Flyby Media to .... Read more.

Muriel Médard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the MIT EECS Department and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT, has been awarded, with co-authors Josu Bilbao, Aitor Calvo, Igor Armendariz, and Pedro Crespo, the Best Paper Award for their work “Reliable Communications with Network coding in narrowband Powerline Channel.” They presented this work at the IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications and its Applications (ISPLC 2014) in Glasgow in March. Read more.

Today, March 12, 2014, marks the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for managing general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Geneva where Berners-Lee worked at the time as a software engineer. He proposed building a distributed (global) hypertext system which he initially called "Mesh" updating it a year later to the "World Wide Web" as he wrote the code. Read more.

Using artificial intelligence tools including probabilistic graphical models, Ying Liu, EECS graduate student working with Alan Willsky, EECS professor and director of the Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems (LIDS) has developed a technique that can efficiently infer vital information about the propagation of flight delays at U.S. airports. Liu and Willsky will present their work, which has potential application to a wide range of areas, at the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation in early December. Read more.

Sanjoy K. Mitter, professor of electrical engineering and principal investigator and former director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT, has been selected as Fellow by the International Federation of Automatic Control. He is cited in this honor “for fundamental contributions to nonlinear filtering, stochastic control, optimization, optimal control, hybrid systems theory, and the unification of communication and control.”

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty members and principal investigators in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) Tim Lu and Rahul Sarpeshkar have designed cells that exploit natural integral biochemical functions to make analog circuits to perform calculations and potentially act as pathogen sensors. The researchers, including lead author MIT postdoc Ramiz Daniel and microbiology graduate student Jacob Rubens have published their work in the May 15 online edition of Nature Biotechnology.

Researchers in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) working with a colleague at Georgia Tech have shown in a paper titled " Optimization of Lyapunov Invariants in Verification of Software Systems" in the latest issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, that principles from control theory can be applied to computer software to improve software verification.

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.