EECS Research: EECS graduate students are part of the team
Ongoing research in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT both impacts the fundamental knowledge base and adds exciting new engineering applications that improve our lives—in many cases responding to needs worldwide. Graduate students are often active participants in this cutting edge effort in both research learning and accomplishment. See some examples below.
Research in the Department can be seen via a number of different 'lenses'-- including efforts carried out in one of the MIT laboratories affiliated with EECS: the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL; the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems, LEES; the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, LIDS; the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, MTL; and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, RLE. (See the full list of associated laboratories to EECS).
Research in the EECS Department is also reflected in part by the research themes BioEECS, EECSenergy, and nanoEECS giving an idea of the wide scope of exciting, often cross-disciplinary work.
Below are examples representing some of the latest research in the areas of biotechnology, energy, nanotechnology, robotics and information technology. More information is available for each example as directed below.
nanoEECS Research: emitters with wide appealEECS graduate students Ying Niu and Stephen Guerrera work with Prof. Tayo Akinwande and research scientist Luis Velasquez-Garcia in the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, MTL. Recent work on developing new dense arrays of high-aspect-ratio single-crystal silicon columns emitters shows promise for multiple applications. |
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Computer Science Research: use 'List.it' to survive the clutterComputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL graduate students Michael Bernstein and Max Van Kleek have worked with EECS Professor David Karger (and undergraduate research assistant Greg Vargas) to develop and recently release a program to help organize the collections of clutter in that plague most people at work and home. List.it, a new information capture tool, tries to efficiently serve the purpose of all the tools people use to create a 'data central' information source.
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bioEECS Research: understanding the real culprits in Alzheimers DiseaseEECS Prof. Collin M. Stultz, with the assistance of HST graduate student Austin Huang, has engineered a way to identify protein structures key to Alzheimer's disease, an important step toward the development of new drugs that could prevent such structures from forming. In their work, biochemical experimental data manipulated by a novel computer modeling technique yield detailed understanding of one type of tau protein associated with the disease. Ultimately, this method could yield similar insights for other diseases, such as cancer. |
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EECS Research: Complex systems explainedEECS graduate student Emily Fox worked with EECS Professor Alan S. Willsky to develop a methodology for automatically constructing computer models that can accurately describe the behavior of complex systems with very little background information. As Fox described in a paper presented to the the Neural Information Processing Systems conference on Dec. 10, 2008, by coming up with the simplest model to explain sets of data including patterns, helpful equations to describe them and probabilities to predict future or ongoing behaviors, the new methodology provides a tool that will potentially save time and effort for scientists, economists and researchers of complex systems. |
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Agile Robotics: Autonomous ForkliftEECS graduate students, Tara Sainath, pictured right, and Andrew Correa, not pictured, are part of a large research team in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, CSAIL, under the direction of EECS Professor Seth Teller and collaborating with researchers from the Lincoln and Draper Labs to design an autonomous robotic forklift that will perform lifting functions either autonomously or under human operation. See: http://www.csail.mit.edu/feature7/ttp://www.csail.mit.edu/
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EECS Research: Electronic Photonic Integrated Circuits, EPIC, projectsEECS faculty members, including Professors Judy Hoyt, Erich Ippen, Franz Kaertner, Rajeev Ram and Henry I. Smith and nineteen EECS graduate students are combining efforts to investigate a type of photonic ADC (analog to digital conversion) i.e., a downconverting ADC for digitizing a narrowband microwave signal with a very high carrier frequency (40 GHz and higher). Several photonic ADC techniques have been investigated in recent years. The photonic ADC architecture pursued here in the form of an electronic-photonic integrated circuit is known as time-interleaved optical sampling using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) techniques.
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EECSenergy Research: Circuits made more powerful and efficientEECS Prof. David Perreault works with his graduate student team on addressing growing energy challenges by developing and designing energy processing circuits, ie., power electronics, that can better extract energy from solar, mechanical and thermal sources--in addition to developing power electronics to improve efficiency and energy utilization in applications from lighting to computation to communications. Read about a resonant dc-dc converter for LED lighting developed by LEES graduate student Robert Pilawa and an automotive alternator with embedded switched-mode power electronics. |
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nanoEECS Research: magnetic storage and electronic microchip data-storage taken to a new level Using a novel system based on molecules that can assemble themselves into precise patterns called block-copolymers, EECS Prof. Karl Berggren has teamed with Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering professors Edwin Thomas (DMSE dept. head) and Caroline Ross to come up with a way of beating size limitations that would otherwise crimp improvements in data-storage media and electronic microchips. Berggren and former DMSE graduate student Ion Bita, now at Qualcomm, CA, DMSE grad student Yeon Sik Jung and EECS graduate student Joel Yang (pictured with Berggren right) found a way to combine this self-assembly with conventional lithographic chip-making technology, so that the lithographic patterns provide a set of "anchors" to hold the structure in place, while the self-assembling molecules fill in the fine detail between the anchors. |
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EECSenergy Research: Quantum Dots chemistry and nanotechnology expertise are leading to LED lighting and solar cells of the futureResearchers, including EECS graduate student Alexi Arango, pictured far right, at the Laboratory for Organic Optics and Electronics (LOOE) led by Prof. Vladimir Bulovic, pictured immediate right, have succeeded in printing a nanostructured layer of Cadmium Selenide (CdSe) quantum dots onto a transparent organic semiconductor, forming a unique fully-transparent solar cell that generates more voltage than any other solar cell of its kind. Earlier work with quantum dots on LED lighting are opening up new improved lighting for 21st century needs. |
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nanoEECS Research: new graphene microchip --promises much faster perfomance for cell phone and other communications technologiesResearchers, including EECS graduate student Han Wang and physics graduate student Daniel Nezich under the direction of EECS Professors Jing Kong and Tomas Palacios, both members of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, have succeeded in laying the groundwork for a whole new technology of much faster microelectronic devices using graphene that has been specially grown to produce whole, yet one atom thick layers of the material. The Kong-Palacios team first built an experimental graphene chip known as a frequency multiplier, so called for its capability of taking an incoming electrical signal of a certain frequency and then producing an output signal that is a multiple of that frequency. In this case, the team's graphene chip can double the frequency of an electromagnetic signal. These particular frequency multipliers are significantly cleaner in output--requiring no filtering. |
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Nano-bioEECS Research: new technique allows for controllable pairing of single cells for future researchEECS faculty member Joel Voldman and (former) postdoctoral associate Alison Skelley working with MIT Biology faculty member Rudolf Jaenisch, also member of the Whitehead Institute and his postdoctoral associate Oktay Kirak have, as a team, designed an ingenious sorting method to allow successful live cell fusion rates from around 10 percent to about 50 percent above what was formerly possible. Pairing up cells so they can be fused together into a hybrid cell for example will make the genetic reprogramming that occurs in such hybrids readily available for research. The work, of which Skelley and Kirak were lead authors, was published in the Jan. 4, 2009 online Nature Methods. In addition to helping with studies of stem cell reprogramming, this technique could be used to study interactions between any types of cells. |
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NanoEECS research team develops novel technique to produce lines on chips no longer limited to dimension of the wavelength of lightIn the Research Lab of Electronics' Nanostructures Lab, EECS faculty member Henry I. Smith, second from left in photo right, and team members research engineer Rajesh Menon, standing far left in photo, and EECS graduate student Sidney Tsai, and MIT Chemistry graduate student Trisha Andrew have designed a novel technique for etching lines on chips that are not limited by the wavelength of light--a previously restraining factor in microchip fabrication. The work, was published in an advance 'express' article in the April 9, 2009 issue of Science. In addition to extending the nano dimensions of micro chip line creation, the new technique, 'absorbance modulation' will lead to multiple applications, including nano-imaging, and further reductions in size--down to the molecular level. |
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