/csailnews News Articles about CSAIL (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and CSAIL Members. Articles generated by CSAIL and by other sources. en-us Thu, 7 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT /rssintro news@csail.mit.edu webmaster@csail.mit.edu http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/robots_pr.html They're exploring the deep sea and distant planets. They're saving lives in the operating room and on the battlefield. They're transforming factory floors and filmmaking. They're - oh c'mon, they're just plain cool! From Qrio to the Terminator, here are our absolute favorites (at least for now). Thu, 7 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT /node/100 /node/92 Sergey Yekhanin, a recent CSAIL doctoral student, has won the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation award, carrying with it a $20,000 cash prize. Yekhanin beat out 116 other dissertations for the prestigious honor. The competition is open to universities around the world, who are invited to nominate one or two Ph.D. theses in any area of computer science or computer engineering. Yekhanin will receive his award at ACM’s annual conference on June 21, in San Francisco, CA. Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/92 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=visionary-research For all their sophistication, computers still can't compete with nature's gift—a brain that sorts objects quickly and accurately enough so that people and primates can interpret what they see as it happens. Despite decades of development, computer vision systems still get bogged down by the massive amounts of data necessary just to identify the most basic images. Throw that same image into a different setting or change the lighting and artificial intelligence is even less of a match for good old gray matter. Tue,19 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT /node/93 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aaas-brain-0216.html For many years, Tomaso Poggio's lab at MIT ran two parallel lines of research. Some projects were aimed at understanding how the brain works, using complex computational models. Others were aimed at improving the abilities of computers to perform tasks that our brains do with ease, such as making sense of complex visual images. Fri,15 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT /node/94 http://www.pr-inside.com/w3c-xml-is-ten-r434483.htm To mark the ten year anniversary of the publication of its Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, the World Wide Web Consortium plans throughout 2008 to recognize and thank the dedicated communities and individuals responsible for XML for their contributions -- including people who have participated in W3C's XML groups and mailing lists, the SGML community, and xml-dev -- through a variety of activities and events. XML is a simple, open, and flexible format used to exchange a wide variety of data on and off the Web. The success of XML is a strong indicator of how dedicated individuals, working within the W3C Process, can engage with a larger community to produce industry-changing results. Mon,11 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT /node/96 http://www.intomobile.com/2008/01/31/mit-to-teach-students-how-to-make-apps-for-google-android.html Even though we still wait to see first tangible results from the Open Handset Alliance, that doesn't stop MIT to partner with Google and offer its student Android based software development class. Google folks obviously have some strong connections — and have poured some serious cash, we might add — at the famous Institute, as despite other platforms like Windows Mobile and Symbian already holding a lion share of the smartphone market, this is the first phone based development course to be offered by the school. Wed,30 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT /node/101 http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10573225 AS AMERICA’S presidential election process stumbles its way towards November, fears are surfacing of yet another Florida- or Ohio-style voting fiasco. In the New Hampshire primary on January 8th, both independent polls before the election and exit polls on the day itself predicted that Barack Obama would soundly defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Mrs Clinton’s surprising upset cast fresh doubts over the reliability of the computerised machines used to count the vote. Thu,24 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT /node/102 /node/104 A series of 3 paper sculptures titled "Computational Origami" created by CSAIL principal investigator Prof. Erik Demaine and visiting scientist Martin Demaine will be part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA Museum of Modern Art in from February 24 – May 12, 2008. Tue,15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/104 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/micro-rna-0109.html MIT scientists have found a new way that DNA can carry out its work that is about as surprising as discovering that a mold used to cast a metal tool can also serve as a tool itself, with two complementary shapes each showing distinct functional roles. Tue, 8 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT /node/105 /node/114 While the skylines of every major American city differ from each other, there is one thing many of them have in common: frustrated drivers who may suffer road rage from traffic delays, accidents and congested roads. Thu,15 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/114 /node/116 When Olivier Chatot attended the Humanoid Robotics Competition during IAP last year, he was interested in learning how to program a robot to move and fight. He didn’t expect that the class would lead to a UROP at CSAIL continuing his IAP class project, working on the Little Dog research project, or playing a key role in teaching this year’s IAP course Sun,15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/116 /node/131 The Robotics Science and Systems (6.141) class taught by Professors Daniela Rus, Seth Teller and Nicholas Roy focused on building robots that can operate autonomously to build structures in new and unknown environments. Specifically students were required to engineer robots that were able to explore the environment and find materials for building a shelter. The shelters could range in complexity from a wall to a room-like structure. "The students worked very hard in small teams and built creative robots with implementations of a suite of algorithms for robot localization, navigation, and assembly control," Rus said of the students. The potential applications for this type of engineering include; autonomous navigation with dynamic obstacles, searching and rescuing victims at a disaster area, tidying up a room, clearing the dishes in a cafeteria, delivering packages in an office environment, and fetching a glass from the kitchen. Sun,29 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT /node/131 /node/213 On Thursday, March 15 Professor Robert J. Full of the University of California at Berkeley gave Dertouzos Lecturer Series Talk titled Bipedal Bugs, Galloping Ghosts and Gripping Geckos: Neuromechanical Systems Biology Fri,14 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT /node/213 /node/431 During the week of March 17th, the MIT community will have a unique opportunity to view the world through a different set of eyes. Hapa, a student group dedicated to issues affecting people with mixed ethnic backgrounds, has organized the delivery of a Human Race Machine to Lobby 10. Sun,16 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT /node/431 /node/432 A group of CSAIL students, lead by Professor Nick Roy and partnering with Ascending Technologies, won “Best Mission Performance” and “Best Rotorcraft Performance” at the 2008 Micro-Air Vehicle Competition. The competition featured select teams from around the world as part of the inaugural US-Asian Demonstration and Assessment of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology Conference. Held in India from March 10-15th, the conference was created to highlight the latest research in both micro-air vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles. Wed,26 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT /node/432 /node/456 On Monday, July 21, CSAIL hosted a group from NASA’s Robotics Academy to tour the lab and find out more about what MIT has to offer; this year marks the fourth year of the Academy’s partnership with CSAIL. Assistant Director of Infrastructure Jack Costanza welcomed the 23 undergraduate students, along with Robotics Academy Dean of Academic Affairs Wence Lopez, Operations Manager Gabriel Goldman and Logistics Manager Mikaela Gomes, in the fourth-floor Kiva conference room. During a breakfast reception, they were given an overview of CSAIL’s past in the form of building 20, as well as its present research and accolades and its goals for future projects. Sun,27 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/456 /node/469 On July 28th, 2008, Young Scientist Competition winner David McCarthy and his family toured CSAIL, affording them a chance to look behind the scenes at the lab. McCarthy’s project, “Variation on single instruction computer,” was selected as the top choice for the prize. Fri, 8 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/469 /node/470 On July 29th, the World Wide Web Consortium took another step towards making internet access easier on mobile devices. The W3C, which is housed in CSAIL’s Stata Center, is attempting to streamline the process of remote Web access by standardizing mobile markup languages. W3C functions as a partnership between CSAIL, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics in France, and Japan’s Keio University. Sat, 9 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/470 /node/474 Digital data is everywhere – and so, by definition, are its traces. It is in your cell phone calls, your social networking pages, your inbox, and even in the GPS tracker in your car. CSAIL professor Hal Abelson wants to know if, in today'’s computerized society, privacy is something that can ever be guaranteed, or even expected. Mon, 1 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/474 /node/475 Google's announcement last fall that it would be making health records available online touched off a flurry of concerns about patient privacy in the digital age. Now MIT researchers have developed a piece of software that will help to assuage doubts about how sensitive information is protected. Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/475 /node/476 CSAIL professor Rod Brooks sat down for an interview with Katie Baker at Newsweek in order to outline his vision of the directions that robotics will take going forward. Brooks, also the cofounder and CTO of iRobot, became an MIT faculty member in 1984. Thu,21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/476 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/android-prize-0829.html A team of MIT students walked away from their spring-semester course with a lot more than just an A and six credits: They just won a $275,000 top prize from Google for the application they developed for the company's new open-source Android cell-phone system. Fri,29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/478 http://www.design-reuse.com/news/19004/unclonable-silicon-chips.html New Security Technology Exploits Uniqueness of Individual Silicon Chips for Authentication and Secret Key Generation PALO ALTO, Calif. — Verayo, a security and authentication technology provider, today introduced security solutions based on "unclonable" silicon chips. The core technology that makes these silicon chips unclonable is called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/479 /node/494 NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering Nancy Lynch was honored in late August at a series of joint lectures, co-hosted by the Principles of Distributed Computing and the International Conference on Concurrency Technology. The symposium, which coincided with the professor’s 60th birthday celebration, lauded her contributions to the foundations of distributed computing in a variety of ways. Lynch received her PhD from the Institute in 1972 and has been an MIT faculty member since 1982. Wed,10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/494 /node/495 CSAIL professor Erik Demaine won the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize. The Prize, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University and Tokyo University of Technology, is endowed by Japanese entrepreneur Koh Katayanagi and honors promising young researchers in the computer science field. Sun,20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT /node/495