Research

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.

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.

EECS Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan announced today the appointment of Ron Rivest as the new holder of the Vannevar Bush Professorship. The Bush Chair is an Institute-wide professorship established in 1982 as a memorial to one of the outstanding scientists and engineers of the twentieth century.

Along with 9 other finalists, EECS graduate student Cody Gilleland presented his dream research proposal in April to Regeneron. He was named inaugural recipient, based on his presentation to essentially bring Moore's law to early stage drug delivery by designing a new system for developing and validating drug targets (prior to mouse model trials).

Dina Katabi, professor in the MIT EECS Department, principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and co-director of Wireless@MIT has been selected as a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She is cited by the MacArthur Fellows Program for her work "at the interface of computer science and electrical engineering to improve the speed, reliability, and security of data exchange. Katabi has contributed to a range of networking issues, from protocols to minimize congestion in high-bandwidth networks to algorithms for spectrum analysis, though most of her work centers on wireless data transmission."

EECS graduate students Alessandro Chiesa and Madars Virza have teamed to develop a new system which can detect tampering in the cloud. The team presented their system, which is described as a practical, succinct zero-knowledge proof for arbitrary programs, at the International Cryptology Conference in August. Read more

Detecting early-stage malarial infection of blood cells is a diagnostic that has recently come closer to reality through the work of MIT's Anantha Chandrakasan, EECS Department Head, and Subra Suresh, former MIT Dean of Engineering, now president of Carnegie Mellon University. The work, which has been published Aug. 8 in the journal Lab on a Chip, is potentially applicable to detecting other infections and diseases.

Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics, was recently featured in the MIT News Office — following the selection by Technology Review of Rethink Robotics as one of 50 Disruptive Companies 2013. Founded by Brooks in 2008, Rethink Robotics is stocking manufacturers with easily taught assembly-line capable robots that can work safely alongside humans.

CSAIL News: EECS professor Nancy Lynch, who heads the Theory of Distributed Systems Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and EECS graduate student Moshen Ghaffari, and Cal Newport, a former graduate student in Lynch’s group who’s now an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University have used adversarial models in achieving greater network stability for adhoc networks, ie., for wireless device use.

Mehmet Fatih Yanik, associate professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering at MIT and head of the High-Throughput Neurotechnology Group based in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) has created his life's work by combining his training in physics and engineering with his passion for understanding the complexities of the human nervous system and how to determine therapeutics for neurological disorders. Read more...

New research to be presented at the 2013 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference could transform field of 3-D printing. Read about the work of EECS/CSAIL Professor Wojciech Matusik and his group to simplify the software that drives the 3D printing of multi-material objects. July 25 article by Abby Abazorius, CSAIL.

Researchers from CSAIL and Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing have developed a TCP congestion-control system called Remy, which they will present at the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications. Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and EECS graduate student Keith Winstein are the authors of the work titled "TCP ex Machina: Computer-Generated Congestion Control".