Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

A new system relies on short-range Bluetooth signals emitted from people’s smartphones to trace who they've been in contact with. These signals represent random strings of numbers, likened to “chirps” that other nearby smartphones can remember hearing, offering a way to find people who may have been in contact with people who have tested positive for Covid-19.

Bluetooth signals from your smartphone could automate Covid-19 contact tracing while preserving privacy

A system that enables smartphones to transmit “chirps” to nearby devices could notify people if they have been near an infected person.

April 8, 2020

MIT postdoc Michael Wessely shows off the SprayableTech prototype.

Sprayable user interfaces

CSAIL's SprayableTech system lets users create large-scale interactive surfaces with sensors and displays using airbrushed inks.

April 8, 2020

Left to right: Department of Mathematics Professor Alan Edelman, his co-instructor and family Corgi Philip, and visiting professor and longtime Julia lab collaborator David Sanders have altered their computational thinking course to encourage input on COVID-19 responses.

Computational thinking class enables students to engage in Covid-19 response

Nearly 300 students join an open course that applies data science, artificial intelligence, and mathematical modeling using the Julia language to study Covid-19.

April 7, 2020

MIT Senior Research Associate Kendyll Burnell and her poodle Soma examine neural imaging data together at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Researching from home: Science stays social, even at a distance

Picower Institute researchers are advancing their work in many ways despite time away from the lab required to corral Covid-19.

April 7, 2020

Paradigm4 allows users to integrate data from sources like genomic sequencing, biometric measurements, environmental factors, and more into their inquiries to enable new discoveries across a range of life science fields.

Accelerating data-driven discoveries

Life science companies use Paradigm4’s unique database management system to uncover new insights into human health.

April 4, 2020

A simulation system invented at MIT to train driverless cars creates a photorealistic world with infinite steering possibilities, helping the cars learn to navigate a host of worse-case scenarios before cruising down real streets.

System trains driverless cars in simulation before they hit the road

Using a photorealistic simulation engine, vehicles learn to drive in the real world and recover from near-crash scenarios.

March 23, 2020

“I’ve recently encountered researchers at a loss for how to describe their visualizations in ways that make them more accessible. When visualizations appear in, say, textbooks, scientific publications, or educational materials, they might appear as braille translations of the image, but more often they appear as textual descriptions. But what is the best way to describe a visualization?,” sa...

3Q: Collaborating with users to develop accessible designs

An MIT team discusses the pitfalls of “parachute research” and the importance of “sociotechnical” factors.

March 13, 2020

“Doing machine learning the right way”

Professor Aleksander Madry strives to build machine-learning models that are more reliable, understandable, and robust.

March 7, 2020

Roboticists are developing automated robots that can learn new tasks solely by observing humans. At home, you might someday show a domestic robot how to do routine chores.

Showing robots how to do your chores

By observing humans, robots learn to perform complex tasks, such as setting a table.

March 5, 2020

MIT cognitive scientists have developed a computer model of face recognition that performs a series of computations that reverse the steps that a computer graphics program would use to generate a 2D representation of a face.

A new model of vision

Computer model of face processing could reveal how the brain produces richly detailed visual representations so quickly.

March 4, 2020

CurveBoards are 3D breadboards — which are commonly used to prototype circuits — that can be designed by custom software, 3D printed, and directly integrated into the surface of physical objects, such as smart watches, bracelets, helmets, headphones, and even flexible electronics. CurveBoards can give designers an additional prototyping technique to better evaluate how circuits will look and f...

Integrating electronics onto physical prototypes

In place of flat “breadboards,” 3D-printed CurveBoards enable easier testing of circuit design on electronics products.

March 3, 2020

MIT's new system allows a self-driving car to situate itself in snowy conditions.

To self-drive in the snow, look under the road

Weather’s a problem for autonomous cars. MIT’s new system shows promise by using “ground-penetrating radar” instead of cameras or lasers.

February 26, 2020

In a new metadata-protecting scheme, users send encrypted messages to multiple chains of servers, with each chain mathematically guaranteed to have at least one hacker-free server. Each server decrypts and shuffles the messages in random order, before shooting them to the next server in line.

Protecting sensitive metadata so it can’t be used for surveillance

System ensures hackers eavesdropping on large networks can’t find out who’s communicating and when they’re doing so.

February 26, 2020

A crash course in deep learning organized and taught by grad students Alexander Amini (right) and Ava Soleimany reaches more than 350 MIT students each year; more than a million other people have watched their lectures online over the past three years.

Bringing deep learning to life

MIT duo uses music, videos, and real-world examples to teach students the foundations of artificial intelligence.

February 24, 2020

PatternEx’s Virtual Analyst Platform uses machine learning models to detect suspicious activity on a network. That activity is then presented to human analysts for feedback that improves the systems’ ability to flag activity analysts care about.

A human-machine collaboration to defend against cyberattacks

PatternEx merges human and machine expertise to spot and respond to hacks.

February 21, 2020

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