Computer science and technology

Jessy Lin, an MIT senior double-majoring in electrical engineering and computer science and in philosophy.

I think, therefore I code

Senior Jessy Lin, a double major in EECS and philosophy, is programming for social good.

November 15, 2018

The keynote address at the second annual AI and the Future of Work summit was delivered by Rosalin Acosta, Massachusetts Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development.

Artificial intelligence summit addresses impact of technology on jobs and global economy

Speakers at the summit included Massachusetts Secretary of Labor Rosalin Acosta and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

November 15, 2018

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a wireless system that leverages the cheap RFID tags already on hundreds of billions of products to sense potential food contamination.

Putting food-safety detection in the hands of consumers

Simple, scalable wireless system uses the RFID tags on billions of products to sense contamination.

November 14, 2018

From 1983 to 1991, MIT partnered with IBM and the Digital Equipment Corporation to provide computer workstations for students working on aerospace engineering, language learning, educational projects, and much more.

Looking back at Project Athena

A revolutionary educational project in the 1980s put the tools of computation in students’ hands — and foreshadowed even greater changes.

November 11, 2018

“The college is our way of building a powerful framework and environment for research and collaborations that involve computing and that are occurring across disciplines," says School of Engineering Dean Anantha P. Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Bridge to the future of engineering

The School of Engineering’s faculty leadership weigh in on what the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing will mean for their students and faculty.

November 11, 2018

Associate Professor Caitlin Mueller presented on creative computing for high performance design in structural engineering.

Highlighting new research opportunities in civil and environmental engineering

At its annual alumni reception, CEE faculty shared innovative research projects ranging from machine learning to regional impacts of climate change.

November 7, 2018

A new machine-learning model that predicts whether ER patients suffering from sepsis may need to be switched to certain medications could help guide clinicians in sepsis care.

Machine-learning system could aid critical decisions in sepsis care

Model predicts whether ER patients suffering from sepsis urgently need a change in therapy.

November 7, 2018

Often, multiple Wikipedia editors will disagree on certain changes to articles or policies.

Why some Wikipedia disputes go unresolved

Study identifies reasons for unsettled editing disagreements and offers predictive tools that could improve deliberation.

November 6, 2018

MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt at an MIT forum about the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

To build new college, MIT seeks campus and alumni input

Opportunities and new challenges were at the forefront of discussions about the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.

November 2, 2018

MIT researchers describe an autonomous system for a fleet of drones to collaboratively search under dense forest canopies using only onboard computation and wireless communication — no GPS required.

Fleets of drones could aid searches for lost hikers

System allows drones to cooperatively explore terrain under thick forest canopies where GPS signals are unreliable.

November 1, 2018

Youssef Marzouk (left) and Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou assume new roles at the Center for Computational Engineering at “an exciting time for computation at MIT,” says School of Engineering Dean Anantha Chandrakasan.

Youssef Marzouk and Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou to direct the Center for Computational Engineering

New leadership team named for the Institute's interdisciplinary hub for advanced thinking in the science and engineering of computation.

October 31, 2018

MIT researchers have developed a “semantic parser” that learns through observation to more closely mimic a child’s language-acquisition process, which could greatly extend computing’s capabilities.

Machines that learn language more like kids do

Computer model could improve human-machine interaction, provide insight into how children learn language.

October 31, 2018

The new model measures distances between words with similar meanings in “word embeddings,” and then aligns the words in both embeddings that are most closely correlated by relative distances, meaning they’re most likely to be direct translations of one another.

Model paves way for faster, more efficient translations of more languages

New system may open up the world’s roughly 7,000 spoken languages to computer-based translation.

October 30, 2018

A new system developed at CSAIL was shown to have stronger security guarantees than Intel's existing approach for preventing so-called "timing attacks" like Meltdown and Spectre, made possible by hardware vulnerabilities.

Defending against Spectre and Meltdown attacks

New system breaks up cache memory more efficiently to better protect computer systems against timing attacks.

October 18, 2018

MIT researchers have developed a cryptographic system that could help neural networks identify promising drug candidates in massive pharmacological datasets while keeping the data private, which could enable broader pooling of sensitive pharmacological data for predictive drug discovery.

Cryptographic protocol enables greater collaboration in drug discovery

Neural network that securely finds potential drugs could encourage large-scale pooling of sensitive data.