Computer science and technology

Researchers at MIT and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed a new anonymity scheme that provides strong security guarantees but uses bandwidth much more efficiently than its predecessors.

How to stay anonymous online

Network can protect users’ anonymity if all but one of its servers are compromised.

July 11, 2016

A new database interface looks like a spreadsheet. Users don’t need to know database scripting languages such as SQL to create new database queries.

Democratizing databases

With a new tool, any competent spreadsheet user can construct custom database interfaces.

July 8, 2016

A localizing ground-penetrating radar system from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory complements existing technology, with the goal of achieving safe autonomous vehicles.

Pinpointing vehicles with high precision under adverse weather conditions

MIT Lincoln Laboratory radar system achieves centimeter-level localization; could help driverless cars stay in lane when road markings are obscured.

June 23, 2016

The researchers’ compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip.

Analog computing returns

New analog compiler could help enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms.

June 20, 2016

“Multicore systems are really hard to program,” says Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “You have to explicitly divide the work that you’re doing into tasks, and then you need to enforce some synchronization between tasks accessing shared data. What this architecture does, essentially, is to remove all sorts of expli...

Parallel programming made easy

New chip design makes parallel programs run many times faster and requires one-tenth the code.

June 20, 2016

“It’s very inspiring to see how these [hair-like] structures occur in nature and how they can achieve different functions,” says Jifei Ou, a graduate student in media arts and sciences at MIT. “We’re just trying to think how can we fully utilize the potential of 3-D printing, and create new functional materials whose properties are easily tunable and controllable.” Pictured is an examp...

Need hair? Press “print”

With fur, brushes, and bristles, Media Lab’s technique opens new frontier in 3-D printing.

June 16, 2016

Researchers developed a simple application for devices that use Apple’s iOS operating system. The application flashes a small dot somewhere on the device’s screen, attracting the user’s attention, then briefly replaces it with either an “R” or an “L,” instructing the user to swipe either the right or left side of the screen. Correctly executing the swipe ensures that the user has act...

Eye-tracking system uses ordinary cellphone camera

Crowd-sourced data yields system that determines where mobile-device users are looking.

June 15, 2016

Artificial intelligence produces realistic sounds that fool humans

Video-trained system from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab could help robots understand how objects interact with the world.

June 13, 2016

As an undergraduate at MIT, Ned Burnell began thinking about the entire process of making products, and all of the decisions that lead to designing products in a particular way. This is what motivated him to pursue mechanical engineering.

Using engineering savvy to improve product designs

From windmills to software, graduate student Ned Burnell creates better tools.

June 8, 2016

An artist's drawing of a black hole named Cygnus X-1. It formed when a large star caved in. This black hole pulls matter from the blue star beside it.

A method to image black holes

New algorithm could stitch together astronomical measurements made across the globe.

June 6, 2016

“Super Mario Brothers” is hard

Analysis shows popular video game is among the hardest problems in the “complexity class” PSPACE.

June 1, 2016

The Lincoln Laboratory Cross-Language Search Engine team includes (left to right) Elizabeth Salesky, Jennifer Williams, Jennifer Drexler, and Michael Coury.

Finding relevant data in a sea of languages

A cross-language search engine enables English monolingual analysts to find foreign language documents relevant to their investigations.

May 27, 2016

“[T]oday, if you want to write a program, you go and bring in these huge frameworks and these huge pieces of functionality that you then glue together, and you write a little code to get them to interact with each other. If you don’t understand what that big framework is doing, you’re not even going to know where your program is going to start executing,” says Armando Solar-Lezama.

Automatic bug finder

System could make complex analysis practical for programs that import huge swaths of code.

May 25, 2016

$An artist’s embellishment of an image of the “gain medium” used to produce terahertz frequency combs. The different colors indicate that different wavelengths of oscillating terahertz radiation travel different distances through the medium, which has a different refractive index for each of them.$

Speedy terahertz-based system could detect explosives

Spectroscopic system with chip-scale lasers cuts detection time from minutes to microseconds.

May 20, 2016

“I think just by talking to each other and helping people, not only do you potentially inspire someone, or help them make the right choice, but also you learn a lot yourself,” Donald Little says.

Helping others in daily doses

Senior Donald Little uses computer science to improve people’s everyday lives.

May 19, 2016

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Browse By

Topics

Departments

Centers, Labs, & Programs

Schools

Topic