Electrical engineering and computer science (EECS)

Five of the 16 individuals in the 2016 class of National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees hail from MIT. They include Associate Professor Joseph Jacobson (top left), Jonathan (JD) Albert '97 (top right), Radia Perlman '73, SM '76, PhD '88 (center), Barrett Comiskey '97 (bottom left), and Ivan Sutherland PhD '63 (bottom right).

Five with MIT ties tapped for Inventors Hall of Fame

MIT professor and four alumni honored for inventing electronic ink, the spanning tree protocol, and Sketchpad, a human-machine graphical communication system.

February 5, 2016

John Wyatt, longtime MIT professor and cofounder of Boston Retinal Implant Project, dies at 69

Dedicated researcher was a circuits expert developing a retinal implant to help the blind see.

February 5, 2016

Welcome the MIT Siebel Scholars for 2016

Graduate students from bioengineering, business, computer science, and energy science join a distinguished intellectual community.

February 4, 2016

Much of Daskalakis’ work concentrates on the application of computer science techniques to game theory, a discipline that attempts to get a quantitative handle on human strategic reasoning.

Computer science meets economics

Constantinos Daskalakis adapts techniques from theoretical computer science to game theory.

February 4, 2016

Researchers have designed an RFID chip that prevents so-called side-channel attacks, which analyze patterns of memory access or fluctuations in power usage when a device is performing a cryptographic operation, in order to extract its cryptographic key. Pictured here is a standard RFID chip.

Toward hack-proof RFID chips

New technology could secure credit cards, key cards, and pallets of goods in warehouses.

February 3, 2016

A new chip could enable devices that help visually impaired users navigate their environments.

A virtual “guide dog” for navigation

Low-power chip processes 3-D camera data, could enable wearable device to guide the visually impaired.

February 2, 2016

MIT students win first round of SpaceX Hyperloop contest

Design tops more than 100 entries at an international high-speed transportation competition inspired by Elon Musk and sponsored by SpaceX.

February 1, 2016

Course 6 junior Ashley Wang presents her project, “Visualizing Big Data in Mobile Application Development,” at the SuperUROP Research Preview in December.

Learning to solve

Hallmark program “SuperUROP” lets undergrad engineers dive into a year-long research experience.

February 1, 2016

“One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is that we’ve found that there are indeed universal properties of correct code that you can learn from one set of applications and apply to another set of applications,” Martin Rinard says.

Recognizing correct code

Automatic bug-repair system fixes 10 times as many errors as its predecessors.

January 29, 2016

A panel of MIT alumni who shared their experiences with starting and working at young companies included Alice Brooks (speaking), co-founder of Roominate. Other speakers were (from left to right): moderator Arun Saigal, co-founder and CEO of Rappidly; Wei Li, a principal engineer at Eta Devices; Amrita Saigal, co-founder of Saathi; and Theodora Koullias, founder and CEO of Jon Lou.

A jumpstart for entrepreneurs

Intensive course helps students navigate early challenges in starting a company.

January 29, 2016

“Science is always subject to a set of assumptions,” David Gifford says. “What this whole study demonstrates, in my opinion, is that it’s important to think carefully about our assumptions.”

Mapping regulatory elements

Systematically searching DNA for regulatory elements indicates limits of previous thinking.

January 27, 2016

Researchers used the MIT and Tim the Beaver logos to show photoluminescence emissions from a monolayer of molybdenum disulfide inlayed onto graphene. The arrow indicates the graphene-MoS2 lateral heterostructure, which could potentially form the basis for ultrathin computer chips.

New chip fabrication approach

Depositing different materials within a single chip layer could lead to more efficient computers.

January 27, 2016

Marvin Minsky, “father of artificial intelligence,” dies at 88

Professor emeritus was a co-founder of CSAIL and a founding member of the Media Lab.

January 25, 2016

Left to right: Susan Hockfield, Payal Kadakia, Dina Katabi, Helen Greiner, Jesse Draper, Anantha Chandrakasan

Empowering innovation

Panel highlighting female innovators from a range of fields aims to encourage student entrepreneurs.

January 22, 2016

On the top row are two images of a nanomesh bilayer of PDMS cylinders in which the top layer is perpendicular to the complex orientation of the bottom layer. The bottom images show well-ordered nanomesh patterns of PDMS cylinders. The images on the right show zoomed-in views of the images on the left.

Self-stacking nanogrids

Polymer nanowires that assemble in perpendicular layers could offer route to tinier chip components.