Research

Rahul Sarpeshkar, professor in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and head of the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems Group in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) is featured by the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) at MIT for his work that blends both biological (wet) and electronic analog circuits (dry) in research that could lead to newly engineered immune cells that could detect cancer cells and kill them, for example. Read more.

Robert D. Blumofe and Charles E. Leiserson were announced today as the winners of the 2013 Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for contributions to robust parallel and distributed computing. The ACM credits Blumofe and Leiserson for developing provably efficient randomized “work-stealing” scheduling algorithms and Cilk, a small but powerful programming-language extension for multithreaded computing. The Kanellakis Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that significantly affect the practice of computing. Read more.

As the director of MIT’s BigData@CSAIL industry initiative, and the co-director of the more research-focused Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for Big Data, EECS professor and CSAIL principal investigator Sam Madden talks with the MIT News Office about the growing complexity of data. From social networks and images to real time financial transactions, Madden talks about the issues (and opportunities) of what to do with this data. Read more.

Dina Katabi has been selected for the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. In announcing this appointment, Department Head Anantha Chandraksan shared the following message with his colleagues in the EECS Department. Read more.

Prof. Daniela Rus, Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and head of the Distributed Robotics Lab (DRL) envisions new ways for design and manufacture of robots — including the potential for one robot per child in schools. She and members from the DRL group received multiple prizes at the Ultra-Affordable Robot competition particularly for the group's printable, origami-inspired Segway robot, called SEG, which won first place.

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.

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.

Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL) including Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, recent EECS PhD graduate Marcus Yip, EECS graduate student Rui Jin and research scientist Nathan Ickes, together with physicians from Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI), have developed a new, low-power signal-processing chip that could lead to a cochlear implant that requires no external hardware. The implant would be wirelessly recharged -- taking just two minutes -- and would run for about eight hours on each charge. Read more.

Timothy K. Lu, Assistant Professor leading the Synthetic Biology Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Department of Biological Engineering and principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), has been selected for a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in support of work to understand biological cells as state machines leading to insights into natural biological systems and synthetic gene circuits. Read more.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department graduate student Mohsen Ghaffari, also a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has developed a new way to use “vertex connectivity” that could ultimately lead to communication protocols that will allow as much network bandwidth as possible. Ghaffari and members of an international team will present this work in January at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in Portland, Oregon.

CSAIL Principal Investigator Srini Devadas and three former students have been selected as the 2014 winners of the Most Influential Paper Award at a prestigious systems research conference. Read more.