CSAIL in the News

On-line Articles:

CSAIL Professors Teach Autonomous Robot Challenge Class
July 1st, 2008
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.

CSAIL's CarTel Team Works to Reduce Traffic Woes
June 20th, 2008
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.

CSAIL Graduate Wins Prestigious ACM Dissertation Award
June 20th, 2008
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.

CSAIL Developing Spoken Language Browser
June 1st, 2008
Despite the growing popularity of audio and video content on the Web, it can be challenging to find them. Most typical search functions can only handle text-based materials, making it very difficult to locate audio or video files without some form of text associated with it.

CSAIL team wins Micro-Air Vehicle Competition
March 27th, 2008
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.

CSAIL team wins Micro-Air Vehicle Competition
March 27th, 2008
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.

CSAIL helps student group bring Human Race Machine to campus
March 17th, 2008
During the week of March 17th, the MIT community will have a unique opportunity to view the world through a different set of eyes.

Humanoid Robotics Competition: Follow Up
February 28th, 2008
It may sound cliché, but it appears that everyone was a winner at this year’s Humanoid Robotics Competition, an IAP course inspired by the Japanese Robo One competition.

Visionary Research: Teaching Computers to See Like a Human - Scientific American
February 20th, 2008
M.I.T. researchers are harnessing computer models of human vision to improve image recognition software.

Learning about brains from computers, and vice versa - MIT News Office
February 16th, 2008
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.

W3C XML is Ten! - Press Release
February 12th, 2008
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

The 50 Best Robots Ever - Wired news
February 8th, 2008
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).

MIT to teach students how to make apps for Google Android - IntoMobile
January 31st, 2008
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.

Hacking the vote - Economist.com
January 25th, 2008
Reliability, more than fraud, bugs voting machines

Humanoid Robotics Competition
January 25th, 2008
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.

English As You've Never Seen It Before - SkyNews
January 17th, 2008
A "visual dictionary" showing what the English language looks like on the web has been created by academics in the US.

Computational Origami
January 16th, 2008
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.

MIT reports new twist in microRNA biology
January 11th, 2008
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.

6001 completes a twenty-seven year run
December 15th, 2007
CSAIL member Professor Gerald Jay Sussman gives the final lecture of 6.001, which is being retired from the MIT curriculum after the Fall 2007 term.

Students Compete Internationally to Build Biological Organisms From Standard Parts
December 13th, 2007
Austin L. Day, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, holds up an IV bag filled with a brown-red liquid resembling bloody-mary mix. The unsavory concoction is Berkeley's entry in a genetic-engineering competition—a blood substitute called "Bactoblood," made from modified bacteria.

Cheap sensors could capture your every move - NewScientistTech
November 27th, 2007
Video games like Dance Dance Revolution could soon require more than just fancy footwork. Small, cheap sensors for tracking the movement of a person's entire body could lead to "whole-body interfaces" for controlling computers or playing games, researchers say.

Cilk Arts Commercializes MIT's Approach to Parallel Programming -Xconomy
November 9th, 2007
If your computer only has a single processor, you're at increasing risk for "core envy." The Intel Core 2 Duo chip in the latest Apple iMac, for example, contains two processors or cores, while the HP Pavilion Media Center desktop has a four-core chip. Sun has been making an eight-core version of its UltraSPARC T1 processor for data centers for two years, the Sony Playstation3 contains an eight-core processor, and eight-core processors for PCs will likely be on the market by 2009.

Computational comparison of multiple Drosophila genomes proves to be a powerful research tool. -CSAIL Spotlight
November 7th, 2007
CSAIL's Computational Biology Group led by Manolis Kellis co-led one of the first large-scale comparisons of multiple animal genomes. Results of the project will appear in four papers in Nature, and 40 companion papers in Genome Research, Genetics, Nature Genetics, and other journals.

MIT develops lecture search engine to aid students -MIT News Office
November 7th, 2007
Imagine you are taking an introductory biology course. You're studying for an exam and realize it would be helpful to revisit the professor's explanation of RNA interference. Fortunately for you, a digital recording of the lecture is online, but the 10-minute explanation you want is buried in a 90-minute lecture you don't have time to watch.

Hundreds attend iGem Jamboree - MIT News Office
November 5th, 2007
After making a thought-provoking presentation on bioengineering a "bacterial assembly line," a jubilant team from Peking University won the grand prize "BioBrick" award in the fourth annual International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) competition held Nov. 3-4 at MIT.

DARPA Grand Challenge Update: Team MIT completes the DARPA Urban Challenge
November 4th, 2007
Out of the 35 teams to attend the qualifying event for the DARPA Urban Challenge last week, team MIT was one of eleven vehicles to qualify and one of six vehicles to complete the race.

Open source synthetic biology- TheScientist.com blog
November 3rd, 2007
I arrived in Cambridge tonight and headed out to a pub near MIT to find the iGEM crew, who were supposed to meet up for an informal get-together before the Jamboree, iGEM's international synthetic biology contest, starts tomorrow (Nov. 3).

The Best Inventions Of The Year - Time Magazine (Domo)
November 1st, 2007
Even a garden-variety robot can memorize specific tasks. What sets Domo apart is its ability to recognize people and to sense and respond to its surroundings.

DARPA Grand Challenge Update: Team MIT has qualified for the DARPA Urban Challenge Finals
November 1st, 2007
Qualifying for the finals is a tremendous achievement. We’d like to thank our team for all their hard work both at the National Qualifying Event and in the months it took to get there.

Top 100 living geniuses - UK Telegraph (Tim Berners-Lee)
October 31st, 2007
British geniuses feature heavily in a recent list that notes the greatest living thinkers of our time - proportionately more than any other country.

DARPA Grand Challenge Update: Smoke particles from the Santa Anna fires cause havoc - CSAIL Spotight
October 25th, 2007
Smoke particles from the Santa Ana fires clogged the vehicle's main generator and blew it out last night.

DARPA Grand Challenge Update - CSAIL Spotight
October 24th, 2007
The DARPA Urban Challenge national qualification event begins on Friday.

Robots will become part of daily life - Washington Post (Rodney Brooks)
October 17th, 2007
Once relegated to science-fiction movies and automobile assembly lines, robots are expected to handle more complex tasks in health care and agriculture, among other areas.

CSAIL helps to organizeFourth Annual RECOMB Satellite on Regulatory Genomics - CSAIL Spotlight (Manolis Kellis)
October 16th, 2007
CSAIL PI Manolis Kellis helped organize the 4th Annual RECOMB Satellite on Regulatory Genomics, organized jointly by the Broad Institute, CSAIL, and Harvard Medical School.

Roboticists to ride wave of power, chip and sensor improvements - Cnet News.com
October 11th, 2007
The Boston area has become a leading robotics hub, with a larger cluster of related companies than any other area in the U.S., according to a group of panelists assembled for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum on Robotics Wednesday nigh

Graduate Student Spotlight: Evan Jones
October 9th, 2007
The impact of my research will be completely hidden and invisible. My work lives in the server rooms and data centers scattered all over the planet. Ideally, my work will help people design and build reliable systems that take advantage of the resources of many computers connected over networks.

DARPA Urban Challenge Update - CSAIL Spotlight
October 1st, 2007
Members of CSAIL gathered for a barbeque lunch today to congratulate the members of the MIT DARPA Urban Challenge team and to wish them luck in the next phases of the competition.

MIT appoints 23 faculty to named professorships - MIT News Office (Edward Adelson, Dina Katabi, Manolis Kellis, Collin Stultz )
September 28th, 2007
Twenty-three MIT faculty members have been appointed to named professorships. All are effective July 1, 2007.

MIT Team Designs Autonomous Vehicle - The Tech (John Leonard, Seth Teller)
September 28th, 2007
Imagine you are driving around town when you pull up to a stop sign. As you glance over at the car across the intersection, you are astonished to see that there is no driver. As the car makes a smooth right turn, you realize that the car is driving itself.

Robot Diet Coach Keeps You in Line - abcNews (Edsinger)
September 27th, 2007
Inventor Aaron Edsinger has been working with his creation, a robot called Domo, putting him through his paces.

Cryptography Pioneer Ronald L. Rivest Receives Marconi Award - cnnMoney.com (Rivest)
September 26th, 2007
VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the leading provider of digital infrastructure for the networked world, today announced Dr. Ronald L. Rivest, professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a co-founder of VeriSign, will be honored Friday as the Marconi Fellow for 2007 at the Marconi Society's annual award dinner in Menlo Park, Calif. A cash award of $100,000 accompanies the honor.

Pawan Deshpande receives Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation award - CSAIL Spotlight (Deshpande)
September 26th, 2007
Pawan Deshpande has received a Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation award for the high quality of his M. Eng. Thesis, "Decoding Algorithms for Complex Natural Language Tasks."

Think your room is messy? Maybe not - msnbc (Rosenholtz)
September 25th, 2007
You may intuitively recognize those dirty clothes scattered across your bedroom floor or the piles of papers burying your desktop as a total mess, but scientists have now figured out a way to measure just how cluttered your room or cubicle really is.

MIT alums win MacArthur 'genius' award - MIT News (Matsuoka)
September 25th, 2007
Pawan Deshpande has received a Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation award for the high quality of his M. Eng. Thesis, "Decoding Algorithms for Complex Natural Language Tasks."

MIT model could improve some drugs' effectiveness - MIT News Office (Bruce Tidor)
September 23rd, 2007
MIT researchers have developed a computer modeling approach that could improve a class of drugs based on antibodies, molecules key to the immune system.

Rodney Brooks' Robots are Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control - 10 Zen Monkeys (Rodney Brooks)
September 23rd, 2007
MIT alumni Saul Griffith (S.M. 2001, Ph.D. 2004) and Yoky Matsuoka (S.M. 1995, Ph.D. 1998) have been awarded 2007 MacArthur fellowships, more commonly known as "genius" grants.

Alumni Spotlight: Helen Greiner - CSAIL Spotlight
September 20th, 2007
Helen Greiner a former CSAIL/ AI lab graduate student, will be inducted into at the Women in Technology Internationals Hall of Fameon September 27th.

Unique Middle East program rooted at MIT bears fruit - MIT News Office
September 19th, 2007
Three years ago, Wissam Jarjoui faced an uncertain future in an unstable place. The Palestinian student from East Jerusalem had never met an Israeli, and he hadn't even heard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MIT Students Create Car That Drives Itself - BostonChannel.com (John Leonard)
September 19th, 2007
Thirty-six teams from across the country are getting ready to compete in the ultimate robot challenge. Creating a robotic vehicle that can travel in any urban setting is the goal of the DARPA Urban Challenge.

Liskov, Harris to share new leadership position for faculty equity - MIT News Office (Liskov)
September 10th, 2007
Barbara Liskov, Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Wesley Harris, Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and currently head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, have been selected to share the office of Associate Provost for Faculty Equity, Provost L. Rafael Reif announced on Sept. 7.

MIT Plans to Win DARPA Robot Car Challenge - Xconomy (Seth Teller)
September 4th, 2007
Driving in urban traffic is a stupendously tricky task demanding a constant stream of split-second, almost subconscious decisions. In fact, if you give it too much thought—Am I driving inside the lane markers?

Stonebraker Raises Vertica's DW Profile - intelligent enterprise (Michael Stonebraker)
August 30th, 2007
I had a long briefing with database legend Michael Stonebraker today, and I feel compelled to share a few highlights of the conversation. Stonebraker is known as a visionary, and he has consistently turned those visions into long-term bets through commercial startups.

Graduate Research Highlight: Swarmbots (James McLurkin)
August 30th, 2007
CSAIL graduate student James McLurkin finds inspiration for his distributed robotic systems in nature. The behavior of his swarmbots, a swarm of 100 tiny robots, are based on the way insects communicate, specifically ants and bees.

Adobe Snatches Up Stars from Crumbling Mitsubishi Lab--Creates Boston Research Outpost - Xconomy (Frédo Durand, Sylvain Paris)
August 29th, 2007
Adobe Systems, the San Jose, CA-based company whose graphics and visual design programs are used by millions of people every day, has hired at least three prominent Boston-area computer scientists away from Cambridge’s troubled Mitsubushi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL) to form Adobe’s first significant research outpost outside the West Coast.

MEET Alumni accepted to MIT
August 28th, 2007
For many students getting into MIT is something they dream about, but will never achieve. Wissam Jarjoui, class of 2011, has always had dreams, but until he joined the program Middle East Education Through Technology (MEET) they did not include MIT.

MIT's 'clutter detector' could cut confusion - MIT News (Ruth Rosenholtz)
August 21st, 2007
The danger of clutter--especially on a visual screen--is that it causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks.

Tilera Corp announces that it is shipping 64-core processor (Anant Agarwal)
August 20th, 2007
Tilera Corp founded by CSAIL's Prof. Anant Agarwal, announced that it has begun to ship a 64-core processor.

Testing in the Heat (David Moore, Edwin Olson, and Albert Huang)
August 7th, 2007
CSAIL students David Moore, Edwin Olson, and Albert Huang conduct testing of MIT's DARPA grand challenge vehicle at a hangar at the South Weymouth Navel Air Station.

Happy birthday to the WWW - gizmag (Tim Berners-Lee)
August 7th, 2007
The invention of the Internet cannot be pinned down to any specific time, place or person as it was developed primarily for military and scientific applications throughout the 60s and 70s in the US.

Meet the nerd who's already shaping the future - Canadian Technology News (Hal Abelson)
August 6th, 2007
Professor Hal Abelson, founder of the creative commons movement and MIT prof, talks to us about why computer science classes are becoming increasingly irrelevant and how AI might be the key to filling more seats

SIMILE: Rich Internet Collections - Dr. Dobb's Portal (David Karger)
July 30th, 2007
David Karger is a professor at MIT and a Principal Investigator on the Simile Project, an effort that seeks to enhance interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services.

The Real Transformers - The New York Times (Lijin Aryananda, Rodney Brooks, Aaron Edsinger)
July 29th, 2007
David Karger is a professor at MIT and a Principal Investigator on the Simile Project, an effort that seeks to enhance interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services.

Street wise - The Boston Globe (Hari Balakrishnan, Samuel Madden)
July 22nd, 2007
Information gleaned from onboard sensors could lead to speedier commutes, safer driving, and fewer potholes

Uncle Sam Wants You: To Build a Better Voting Machine - Wired Blog (Ronald Rivest)
July 18th, 2007
Four teams of researchers from universities in the U.S., Canada, Poland and the United Kingdom begin competing today in Portland, Oregon, to win a prize for the best open-source voting system.

MIT encryption pioneer Rivest wins Marconi Prize - MIT News Office (Ronald Rivest)
July 17th, 2007
MIT Professor Ronald L. Rivest, who helped develop one of the world's most widely used Internet security systems, has been named the 2007 Marconi Fellow and prize-winner for his pioneering work in the field of cryptography, computer and network security.

Will John Wilbanks Launch the Next Scientific Revolution? - Popular Science (John Wilbanks)
July 17th, 2007
Using innovative copyrights and a Web 2.0 platform, John Wilbanks may just transform how scientific discoveries are made

The future of the Web as seen by its creator - ITworld.com (Tim Berners-Lee)
July 9th, 2007
According to Webster's Online Dictionary semantic means "the relationships between symbols and what they represent." Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, has used the term to christen the Internet of the future.

Genetic Engineers Who Don't Just Tinker - New York Times (Thomas Knight )
July 8th, 2007
FORGET genetic engineering. The new idea is synthetic biology, an effort by engineers to rewire the genetic circuitry of living organisms.

Ice cream social to honor Rod Brooks
June 28th, 2007
Yesterday afternoon CSAIL had a chance to honor its outgoing Director, Rod Brooks at an ice cream social. The social featured a video of Brook's accomplishments, which ranged from professorships, authorships, new innovations in robotics, and one staring role in a movie.

Drivers Unwanted: MIT 'Robocar' takes a spin - MIT News Office (Albert Huang, John Leonard, Edwin Olson, Seth Teller)
June 28th, 2007
Last week the team tested its vehicle during a site visit by personnel from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is funding the work through the third DARPA Urban Challenge competition.

Brooks Steps Down as CSAIL Head, Dives Back into Science - Xconomy (Rodney Brooks)
June 27th, 2007
Quipping that he is experiencing "a scientific mid-life crisis," legendary robotics pioneer Rod Brooks is stepping down as Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Brooks' reign at CSAIL, which he has directed since its 2003 formation, will formally end on Friday. However, today marks his first day in his new office, where he will take a year's sabbatical from teaching to embark on two grand challenges of robotics and computer science.

Puzzles Will Save The World - The Boston Globe (Martin Demaine and Erik Demaine)
June 24th, 2007
Martin Demaine is kidding, mostly, when he says this, but his puzzles have made cars safer, candies easier to unwrap, and maybe one day will help cure diseases. (Free Registration may be required.)

Excitement on Student Street (Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams Odyssey)
June 21st, 2007
Student Street of the Stata Center has been buzzing with the excitement from the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams Odyssey for the past two days. Young inventors have converged on the Stata Center to display their inventions, made possible with grants from the Lemelson Foundation.

Does Gehry's Stata Center Really Work? - Business Week (Stata Center)
June 19th, 2007
Three years after it opened to much fanfare, how is the infamous MIT building holding up?

Web inventor gets Queen's honour - BBC News (Tim Berners-Lee)
June 13th, 2007
The inventor of the world wide web has been awarded the Order of Merit, one of the UK's most prestigious honours.

The pit crews behind DARPA's robot race - cnet News.com (John Leonard, Seth Teller)
June 5th, 2007
People in downtown Ithaca, N.Y., got a glimpse this spring of the vehicular equivalent of a headless horseman--a Chevy Tahoe gutted and modified with computers, wire controls and sensors so that it can drive city streets by itself.

Automatic and versatile publications ranking for research institutions and scholars - acm Portal (Michael Ernst and Daniel Jackson)
June 1st, 2007
Assessing both academic and industrial research institutions, along with their scholars, can help identify the best organizations and individuals in a given discipline. Assessment can reveal outstanding institutions and scholars, allowing students and researchers to better decide where they want to study or work and allowing employers to recruit the most qualified potential employees. These assessments can also assist both internal and external administrators in making influential decisions; for example, funding, promotion, and compensation.

Jonathan Bachrach Collaborates with Snappy Dance Theater (Jonathan Bachrach)
May 31st, 2007
Assessing both academic and industrial research institutions, along with their scholars, can help identify the best organizations and individuals in a given discipline. Assessment can reveal outstanding institutions and scholars, allowing students and researchers to better decide where they want to study or work and allowing employers to recruit the most qualified potential employees. These assessments can also assist both internal and external administrators in making influential decisions; for example, funding, promotion, and compensation.

Pacemaker may avert seizures - Guardian Unlimited (John Guttag, Ari Shoeb)
May 24th, 2007
Snappy Dance Theater celebrates its 10th anniversary with the world premiere of String Beings, a collaboration with CSAIL research scientist and new media artist Jonathan Bachrach and BSO first violinist Lucia Lin.

Loooooooooong Division - ScienceNow Daily News (Ronald Rivest)
May 23rd, 2007
A team of mathematicians has set a new record for factoring a large number into primes, breaking a massive 307-digit number into its three indivisible factors and besting the previous mark by 30 digits. Written as a binary string of zeros and ones, the number is 1017 places or "bits" long--nearly as long as the 1024-bit numbers currently used to encode electronic messages--and the researchers' method of using a network of computers raises the prospect of hijacking PC and video-game systems to try to crack codes. However, security experts say they're confident they can stay ahead of would-be hackers.

Dertouzos Lecturer Series: Professor Ed Lazowska
May 17th, 2007
Professor Ed Lazowska of the University of Washington gave a Dertouzos Lecturer Series series talk titled "Computer Science: Past, Present, and Future" about the National Science Foundation's Computing Community Consortium.

Newsmaker: Sizing up the coming robotics revolution - cnet News.com (Rodney Brooks)
May 15th, 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--When it comes to robots, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab is one of the places in the world where the magic happens.

Robots move to algorithms - Grand Traverse Herald (James McLurkin)
May 9th, 2007
Tying together science fiction, blockbuster movies, hard work, learning and a large dose of fun, James McLurkin captivated his audience Friday evening.

Future doctors could monitor health through music of the patients' genes. - The Boston Globe (Gil Alterovitz)
May 7th, 2007
There's musical gene expression (see: Hank Williams the first, second, and third) and musical Gene expression (see: Gene Simmons with his tongue out). And then there's the Musical Gene Expression project at Harvard Medical School, which envisions a future where doctors will be able to tune in to the internal music of their patients.

MIT honors humanitarian tech invention - cnet news.com (Bill Thies)
May 3rd, 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The winners of the latest Ideas Competition took on big health issues facing poor countries by doing what most technology innovators do: apply the right mix of intellect, imagination and persistence to the problem.

Eric Mibuari '06 IT analyst founds technology center in Kenya. - MIT Technology Review
May 1st, 2007
Eric Mibuari '06 was not discouraged by the few electrical outlets in the church room donated for the new Laare Community Technology Centre. He'd grown up in Laare, a hilly Kenyan area 200 miles north of Nairobi, so he knew that electricity was spotty. He also knew he would find no shortage of creative energy among community members and church elders.

Daniel Jackson to be featured in LensWork Extended
April 30th, 2007
Some photos taken of the Stata Center by CSAILS Prof. Daniel Jackson will be featured this month in LensWork Extended, a publication that focuses on photography and the creative process.

Rodney Brooks - The Past and Future of Behavior Based Robotics - Laboratory of Intelligent Systems Talking Robots Podcast
April 27th, 2007
In this episode we interview Rodney Brooks on behavior based robotics. He talks about how mosquitoes in Thailand caused a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence, how to build robots that sell, and how 50 years from now you'll be fighting with your robot for spare parts.

Simpler Programming for Multicore Computers A new programming language could make it easier to write software for multicore machines. - MIT Technology Review (Saman Amarasinghe)
April 27th, 2007
The number of cores--or number-crunching units--in microprocessors is doubling with each generation, providing enormous computing potential for desktops, laptops, and, eventually, handheld gadgets. Current quadcore machines, for example, are particularly useful for such computation-hungry applications as video processing and gaming.

Dertouzos Lecturer Series: Professor Andrew Yao
April 26th, 2007
Professor Andrew Yao of the University of California at Berkeley gave Dertouzos Lecturer Series Talk titled "Modern theory of Trust-but-Verify"

PlayStation on MIT curriculum - The Boston Globe (Saman Amarasinghe and Rodric Rabbah)
April 20th, 2007
PlayStation 101, anyone? For young scholars unafraid of giving their thinking caps a full workout, here is an academic subject to consider: MIT and IBM just announced the completion of a course in which students worked with the microprocessor that powers Sony Corp.'s PlayStation3 computer entertainment system.

CSAIL Members to perform at NEFFA, the weekend for the New England Folk Festival Association - CSAIL (David Karger and Karen Sollins)
April 19th, 2007
CSAIL members Prof. David Karger and Dr. Karen Sollins will be performing on April 22nd, 2007 in different dance groups this weekend at NEFFA, the weekend for the New England Folk Festival Association.

Five from MIT are Guggenheim Fellows
April 11th, 2007
Five members of the MIT faculty have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for 2007. They are Edmund Bertschinger, astrophysics division head and professor of physics; Erica Funkhouser, poet and lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; Michel X. Goemans, professor of applied mathematics; Erika Naginski, associate professor of the history of art; and Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning.

Simile: Real World Challenges Drive Research Forward
April 10th, 2007
SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments), a collaborative project between MIT Libraries, David Karger, professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at CSAIL, and Eric Miller, CEO of Zepheira and formerly with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is breaking down limitations in software application interactions, making search functions more inclusive, and personalizing people's interactions with their computers.

Assistive robot adapts to people, new places - MIT News Office (Rodney Brooks and Aaron Edsinger)
April 9th, 2007
n the futuristic cartoon series "The Jetsons," a robotic maid named Rosie whizzed around the Jetsons' home doing household chores--cleaning, cooking dinner and washing dishes.

Researchers 'See' Brain Development - ScienceDaily (Polina Golland, Bruce Fischl, and Yuan Qi)
April 9th, 2007
Large mammals--humans, monkeys, and even cats--have brains with a somewhat mysterious feature: The outermost layer has a folded surface. Understanding the functional significance of these folds is one of the big open questions in neuroscience.

For him, Scrabble is a science - The Boston Globe (Jason Katz-Brown)
April 9th, 2007
Jason Katz-Brown has been described as having a "certain MIT feel about him." This could refer to the fact that he wears cargo shorts in the dead of winter or the fact that he has a large pink seesaw in his dorm room. Or maybe it's because he has memorized every word in the Scrabble dictionary that he always carries in the pocket of those shorts.

  Nancy Lynch Named Recipient of ACM Award for Contributions to Reliability of Distributed Computing; First Woman to Win Prestigious Knuth Prize - AScribe Newswire
April 5th, 2007
NEW YORK, April 5 (AScribe Newswire) -- The ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) will present its 2007 Knuth Prize to Professor Nancy Lynch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for her influential contributions to the theory of distributed systems, which solve problems using multiple processes or computers connected through a shared memory or network.

MIT programmers strike gold - MIT News Office (Martin Rinard and Jelani Nelson)
April 3rd, 2007
A team of MIT programmers won a gold medal in the world finals of the 31st Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, held mid-March in Tokyo.

Tom Greene will retire after 20 years at MIT
March 26th, 2007
Until Tom Greene came to MIT 20 years ago in 1987 he always thought of his life in terms of decades, with each one ending like a chapter in a book. Two decades later, on the eve of his retirement, Greene's life no longer revolves around the same time table.

Imara Project: Making a Difference
March 20th, 2007
Aisha Walcott, a graduate student at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), recently traveled to Laare, Kenya as a representative of the Imara outreach program, which was funded by a grant from the MIT Public Service Center.

Alumni Spotlight: Lijin Aryananda
March 20th, 2007
Lijin Aryananda, a recent graduate of CSAIL with Ph.D in humanoid robotics, left the Stata Center in February to pursue a post doctorate in Zurich, Switzerland. In the wake of her departure she left behind three years worth of friends, colleagues, mentors, and one special friend she built with her own hands. Mertz is an active vision robot and has been Aryananda´s constant companion for the past two years.

Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux: Taking a Power Position - Technewsworld.com
March 20th, 2007
Terra Soft has claimed a fairly unique platform in the Linux community: Power Architecture computers, among which is Sony's PlayStation 3. More than a game box, the PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux runs as a low-cost home and office personal computer and Cell Broadband Engine development workstation. Linux ran on the PS2, but it was definitely a geek-only option. For the PS3, the geek factor was removed.

A Smarter Web - New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0." - MIT Technology Review
March 19th, 2007
Last year, Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear.

Dertouzos Lecturer Series: Robert J Full
March 16th, 2007
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

Will Machines Ever Be Conscious? - MIT Technology Review
March 12th, 2007
If only political debates were this interesting. A quick-witted moderator, two opposing but well-behaved thinkers, and a central question any MIT loyalist would love: will humans ever build conscious, volitional, or spiritual machines?

Personalized Medical Monitors - MIT Technology Review
March 12th, 2007
John Guttag says using computers to automate some diagnostics could make medicine more personal.

The state of Stata - The Boston Globe
March 11th, 2007
(Free Registration Required) Now three years old, the inventive MIT building is meeting many of the goals that were set for it

New center to explore quantum information theory - MIT News Office
March 9th, 2007
What are the ultimate powers of quantum computers, quantum communications and quantum precision measurement systems?

W3C Relaunches HTML Activity - HTMLPrimer
March 8th, 2007
Recognizing the importance of an open forum for the development of the predominant Web content technology, W3C invites browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to help design the next version of HTML by participating in the new W3C HTML Working Group. Based on significant input from the design and developer communities within and outside the W3C Membership, W3C has chartered the group to conduct its work in public and to solicit broad participation from W3C Members and non-Members alike.

These robots are inspired by ants - The Star Ledger
March 8th, 2007
In nature, colonies of ants, sometimes numbering in the millions, work their way back and forth in their nests, moving food, materials and waste for the benefit of the colony.

MacVicar Day celebrates diversity in learning, teaching strategies - MIT News Office
March 6th, 2007
Some people learn better when they are being graded; some do worse. Some like to go over classroom material by saying it out loud to themselves; some like to teach it to others. Some said they learn best when they look, some when they listen and some when they draw pictures.

DARPA Grand Challenge
March 2nd, 2007
Each member of MIT's DARPA Grand Challenge team has their personal and professional reasons for participating in the Grand Challenge, the third competition held by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). Edwin Olson, a PhD candidate in EECS focusing on autonomous robotic navigation, envisions saving the lives of soldiers doing war-time supply runs. Seth Teller, an Associate Professor in EECS, sees the challenge as a milestone on the way to the eventual elimination of car accidents. Albert Huang, another EECS PhD student, dreams about the day that he can be driven safely to his parents' house while reading the newspaper.

Alumni Biography: Sam Madden
March 2nd, 2007
Sam Madden '99, once an undergraduate in EECS and Masters of Engineering student at MIT, is currently enjoying the view from the other side of the desk as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Recently his job was made a little easier with the award of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

2007 CSAIL Olympics
March 2nd, 2007
During IAP (independent activities period) each year the Stata Center's typically quiet halls echo with sounds of laughter and cheering as office chairs are raced down hallways, research abstracts are launched in garbage bins, and binder-clip parachutes sail overhead.

Tim Berners-Lee testifies before the United States House of Representatives Committee
March 1st, 2007
Tim Berners-Lee is testifying before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Chairman Edward Markey invited him as the sole witness for the first in a series on the Digital Future of the United States. Tim Berners-Lee's testimony conludes with an explination of why we need web science:

Victor Zue will direct CSAIL
February 14th, 2007
Victor Zue, co-director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), will become sole director of the lab, effective July 1.

Academy of Engineering elects 5 from MIT - MIT News Office
February 14th, 2007
Five MIT researchers are among the 64 new members of the National Academy of Engineering.

Doug Ross, 77; developed important computer language - Boston Globe
February 10th, 2007
While still in high school, Doug Ross performed a full assembly program of music he had composed. By his late 20s, he had developed a key computer language and coined the term computer-assisted design. A decade later, he taught MIT's first graduate course in software engineering. Perhaps not surprisingly, he occasionally thought daily tasks lacked sufficient challenge.

Mimicking How the Brain Recognizes Street Scenes - newswise
February 6th, 2007
Scientists in Tomaso Poggio's laboratory at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT developed a computational model of how the brain processes visual information and applied it to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this first application of a biologically inspired computer model for artificial vision, which has many potential practical applications.

Runways aid in robotic vehicle research - Weymouth News
January 19th, 2007
Some day drivers will be able to sit back and relax while their robotic vehicles safely transport them through busy city streets.

Imara Update - CSAIL
January 19th, 2007
Aisha Walcott , a CSAIL graduate student, has sent back photographs from her current trip to the Laare Community Technology Centre (LACOTEC) where she is working in conjunction with CSAIL's Imara project and with support from the MIT PSC.

It is Not Whether or Not to Audit Elections, But How, as Explained in an analysis from National Election Data Archive - PRWeb Press Release Newswire
January 17th, 2007
How many ballots have to be counted to detect vote counting errors that are big enough to change the outcome of an election? With more and more contested elections since 2000, the question is not just academic. According to an analysis by M.I.T. mathematician Ronald Rivest, in an average US House race with a 1% margin between candidates and 440 precinct counts, a 2% audit may only have a 27% chance of uncovering vote count error, while a 20% audit may have a 97% chance of uncovering vote count error.

The Future of Robotics - NPR Living on Earth
January 12th, 2007
From vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers to military landmine detectors, robots are becoming increasingly present in our daily lives. Living on Earth's Bruce Gellerman visits MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to meet a humanoid robot named Domo, its creator, PhD student Aaron Elsinger, and the man behind all the magic, CSAIL director Rodney Brooks.

Autonomous Kayaks - MIT Technology Review
January 8th, 2007
On the water, cruising along with no paddles or people in sight, the kayaks look like the evidence of a day trip gone wrong. But one day, small robotic vessels like these, piloting themselves and loaded with high-tech gadgetry, could bring supplies to tsunami survivors or search for hidden explosives in coastal waters.

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