Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a

research institute A research institute, research centre, or research organization is an establishment founded for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often implies natural ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.

Research activities

CSAIL's research activities are organized around a number of semi-autonomous research groups, each of which is headed by one or more professors or research scientists. These groups are divided up into seven general areas of research: *

Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

Graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of the data, as in design and manufa ...

and

vision Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...

Language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

and

learning Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, value (personal and cultural), values, Attitude (psychology), attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and ...

Theory of computation In theoretical computer science and mathematics, the theory of computation is the branch that deals with what problems can be solved on a model of computation, using an algorithm, how efficiently they can be solved or to what degree (e.g., app ...

Robotics Robotics is the interdisciplinary study and practice of the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Within mechanical engineering, robotics is the design and construction of the physical structures of robots, while in computer s ...

* Systems (includes computer architecture, databases,

distributed systems Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different computer network, networked computers. The components of a distribu ...

networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

and networked systems,

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, programming methodology, and

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

, among others)

History

Computing Research at MIT began with

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II, World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almo ...

's research into a

differential analyzer The differential analyser is a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used ope ...

and

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

's electronic

Boolean algebra In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variable (mathematics), variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denot ...

in the 1930s, the wartime

MIT Radiation Laboratory The Radiation Laboratory, commonly called the Rad Lab, was a microwave and radar research laboratory located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was first created in October 1940 and operated until 3 ...

, the post-war

Project Whirlwind Whirlwind I was a Cold War-era vacuum-tube computer developed by the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the U.S. Navy. Operational in 1951, it was among the first digital electronic computers that operated in real-time for output, and the first ...

and Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and

MIT Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...

's SAGE in the early 1950s. At MIT, research in the field of artificial intelligence began in the late 1950s.

Project MAC

On July 1, 1963, Project MAC (the Project on Mathematics and Computation, later

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

ed to Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer) was launched with a $2 million grant from the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

(DARPA). Project MAC's original director was

Robert Fano Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a student and working ...

of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Fano decided to call MAC a "project" rather than a "laboratory" for reasons of internal MIT politics – if MAC had been called a laboratory, then it would have been more difficult to raid other MIT departments for research staff. The program manager responsible for the DARPA grant was J. C. R. Licklider, who had previously been at MIT conducting research in RLE, and would later succeed Fano as director of Project MAC. Project MAC would become famous for groundbreaking research in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

, and the

theory of computation In theoretical computer science and mathematics, the theory of computation is the branch that deals with what problems can be solved on a model of computation, using an algorithm, how efficiently they can be solved or to what degree (e.g., app ...

. Its contemporaries included Project Genie at Berkeley, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and (somewhat later)

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

's (USC's) Information Sciences Institute. An "AI Group" including

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive scientist, cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

(the director), John McCarthy (inventor of

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

), and a talented community of computer programmers were incorporated into Project MAC. They were interested principally in the problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language, which they view as the keys to more intelligent machines. In the 1960s and 1970s the AI Group developed a

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

operating system called

Incompatible Timesharing System Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) is a time-sharing operating system developed principally by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with help from Project MAC. The name is the jocular complement of the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing Syste ...

(ITS) which ran on

PDP-6 The PDP-6, short for Programmed Data Processor model 6, is a computer developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) during 1963 and first delivered in the summer of 1964. It was an expansion of DEC's existing 18-bit systems to use a 36-bit da ...

and later

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

computers. The early Project MAC community included Fano, Minsky, Licklider, Fernando J. Corbató, and a community of computer programmers and enthusiasts among others who drew their inspiration from former colleague John McCarthy. These founders envisioned the creation of a computer utility whose computational power would be as reliable as an electric utility. To this end, Corbató brought the first computer

system,

Compatible Time-Sharing System The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was the first general purpose time-sharing operating system. Compatible Time Sharing referred to time sharing which was compatible with batch processing; it could offer both time sharing and batch proce ...

(CTSS), with him from the MIT Computation Center, using the DARPA funding to purchase an

IBM 7094 The IBM 7090 is a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member of the IBM 700/7000 se ...

for research use. One of the early focuses of Project MAC would be the development of a successor to CTSS,

Multics Multics ("MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of t ...

, which was to be the first

high availability High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system that aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period. There is now more dependence on these systems as a result of modernization ...

computer system, developed as a part of an industry consortium including

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston. Over the year ...

and

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...

. In 1966, ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' featured Project MAC in the September thematic issue devoted to computer science, that was later published in book form. At the time, the system was described as having approximately 100 TTY terminals, mostly on campus but with a few in private homes. Only 30 users could be logged in at the same time. The project enlisted students in various classes to use the terminals simultaneously in problem solving, simulations, and multi-terminal communications as tests for the multi-access computing software being developed.

AI Lab and LCS

In the late 1960s, Minsky's

group was seeking more space, and was unable to get satisfaction from project director Licklider. Minsky found that although Project MAC as a single entity could not get the additional space he wanted, he could split off to form his own laboratory and then be entitled to more office space. As a result, the MIT AI Lab was formed in 1970, and many of Minsky's AI colleagues left Project MAC to join him in the new laboratory, while most of the remaining members went on to form the Laboratory for Computer Science. Talented programmers such as

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

, who used TECO to develop

EMACS Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

, flourished in the AI Lab during this time. Those researchers who did not join the smaller AI Lab formed the Laboratory for Computer Science and continued their research into

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

distributed system Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commun ...

s, and the

. Two professors,

Hal Abelson Harold Abelson (born April 26, 1947) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Tec ...

and Gerald Jay Sussman, chose to remain neutral — their group was referred to variously as Switzerland and Project MAC for the next 30 years. Among much else, the AI Lab led to the invention of Lisp machines and their attempted

commercialization Commercialisation or commercialization is the process of introducing a new product or production method into commerce—making it available on the market. The term often connotes especially entry into the mass market (as opposed to entry into e ...

by two companies in the 1980s:

Symbolics Symbolics, Inc., is a privately held American computer software maker that acquired the assets of the former manufacturing company of the identical name and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp (programming language), Lisp sy ...

and Lisp Machines Inc. This divided the AI Lab into "camps" which resulted in a hiring away of many of the talented programmers. The incident inspired Richard Stallman's later work on the

GNU Project The GNU Project ( ) is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing dev ...

. "Nobody had envisioned that the AI lab's hacker group would be wiped out, but it was." ... "That is the basis for the free software movement — the experience I had, the life that I've lived at the MIT AI lab — to be working on human knowledge, and not be standing in the way of anybody's further using and further disseminating human knowledge".

CSAIL

On the fortieth anniversary of Project MAC's establishment, July 1, 2003, LCS was merged with the AI Lab to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. This merger created the largest laboratory (over 600 personnel) on the MIT campus and was regarded as a reuniting of the diversified elements of Project MAC. In 2018, CSAIL launched a five-year collaboration program with IFlytek, a company sanctioned the following year for allegedly using its technology for surveillance and human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In October 2019, MIT announced that it would review its partnerships with sanctioned firms such as iFlyTek and SenseTime. In April 2020, the agreement with iFlyTek was terminated. CSAIL moved from the School of Engineering to the newly formed Schwarzman College of Computing by February 2020.

Offices

From 1963 to 2004, Project MAC, LCS, the AI Lab, and CSAIL had their offices at 545 Technology Square, taking over more and more floors of the building over the years. In 2004, CSAIL moved to the new Ray and Maria Stata Center, which was built specifically to house it and other departments.

Outreach activities

The IMARA (from Swahili word for "power") group sponsors a variety of outreach programs that bridge the global digital divide. Its aim is to find and implement long-term, sustainable solutions which will increase the availability of educational technology and resources to domestic and international communities. These projects are run under the aegis of CSAIL and staffed by MIT volunteers who give training, install and donate computer setups in greater

Boston, Massachusetts Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

Kenya Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 52.4 million as of mid-2024, Kenya is the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. ...

, Native American Indian tribal reservations in the

American Southwest The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural list of regions of the United States, region of the United States that includes Arizona and New Mexico, along with adjacen ...

such as the

Navajo Nation The Navajo Nation (), also known as Navajoland, is an Indian reservation of Navajo people in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The seat of government is located in ...

, the

Middle East The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...

, and

Fiji Islands Fiji, officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists of an archipelago of more than 330 islands—of which about ...

. The CommuniTech project strives to empower under-served communities through sustainable technology and education and does this through the MIT Used Computer Factory (UCF), providing refurbished computers to under-served families, and through the Families Accessing Computer Technology (FACT) classes, it trains those families to become familiar and comfortable with computer technology.Outreach activities at CSAIL
- CSAIL homepage, MIT.

Notable researchers

(Including members and alumni of CSAIL's predecessor laboratories) *

MacArthur Fellows The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and ...

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

Erik Demaine Erik D. Demaine (born February 28, 1981) is a Canadian-American professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy. Early life and education Demaine was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to mathe ...

Dina Katabi Dina Katabi () is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the director of the MIT Wireless Center. She was designated as one of the world’s most influential women engineers by ''Forbes'' m ...

, Daniela L. Rus, Regina Barzilay,

Peter Shor Peter Williston Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American theoretical computer scientist known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the ...

, and

Joshua Tenenbaum Joshua Brett Tenenbaum (Josh Tenenbaum) is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to mathematical psychology and Bayesian cognitive science. According to the MacArt ...

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...

recipients Leonard M. Adleman, Fernando J. Corbató,

Shafi Goldwasser Shafrira Goldwasser (; born 1959) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. A winner of the Turing Award in 2012, she is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor o ...

, Butler W. Lampson, John McCarthy,

Silvio Micali Silvio Micali (born October 13, 1954) is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. Micali's research at the MIT Compu ...

, Ronald L. Rivest,

Adi Shamir Adi Shamir (; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification sc ...

Barbara Liskov Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939, as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the introduction of abstract da ...

, and

Michael Stonebraker Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943) is an American computer scientist specializing in database, database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to m ...

IJCAI Computers and Thought Award The IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is presented every two years by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), recognizing outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. It was originally funded with royal ...

recipients Terry Winograd, Patrick Winston, David Marr, Gerald Jay Sussman,

Rodney Brooks Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian robotics, roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the behavior based robotics, actionist approach to ro ...

* Rolf Nevanlinna Prize recipients

Madhu Sudan Madhu Sudan (born 12 September 1966) is an Indian-American computer scientist. He has been a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2015. Career He received hi ...

, Constantinos Daskalakis *

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inter ...

recipients

(two-time recipient),

Maurice Herlihy Maurice Peter Herlihy (born 4 January 1954) is an American computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to areas including theoretical foundations of wait-free synchronization, linearizable da ...

Charles Rackoff Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born and raised in New York City, he attended MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1974. He spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar ...

Johan Håstad Johan Torkel Håstad (; born 19 November 1960) is a Swedish theoretical computer scientist most known for his work on computational complexity theory. He was the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1994 and 2011 and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation ...

, and

Grace Murray Hopper Award The Grace Murray Hopper Award (named for computer pioneer RADM Grace Hopper) has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or serv ...

recipients

Robert Metcalfe Robert "Bob" Melancton Metcalfe (born April 7, 1946) is an American engineer and entrepreneur who contributed to the development of the internet in the 1970s. He co-invented Ethernet, co-founded 3Com, and formulated Metcalfe's law, which desc ...

, Guy L. Steele, Jr.,

, and W. Daniel Hillis * Textbook authors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman,

, Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Patrick Winston, Ronald L. Rivest,

, John Guttag, Jerome H. Saltzer, Frans Kaashoek,

Clifford Stein Clifford Seth Stein (born December 14, 1965), a computer scientist, is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York, NY, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Computer Scien ...

, and Nancy Lynch * David D. Clark, former chief protocol architect for the Internet; co-author with Jerome H. Saltzer (also a CSAIL member) and David P. Reed of the influential paper " End-to-End Arguments in Systems Design" * Eric Grimson, expert on computer vision and its applications to medicine, appointed Chancellor of MIT March 2011 *

Bob Frankston Robert M. Frankston (born June 14, 1949) is an American software engineer and businessman who co-created, with Dan Bricklin, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. Frankston is also the co-founder of Software Arts. Early life and education Frankst ...

, co-developer of

VisiCalc VisiCalc ("visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II by VisiCorp on October 17, 1979. It is considered the killer application for the Apple II, turning the microco ...

, the first computer spreadsheet *

Seymour Papert Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artif ...

, inventor of the

Logo programming language Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. The name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Greek ''logos'', meaning 'word' ...

Joseph Weizenbaum Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German-American computer scientist and a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. He is the namesake of the Weizenbaum Award and the Weizenbaum Institute. Life and career ...

, creator of the

ELIZA ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and ...

computer-simulated therapist

Notable alumni

, who later invented

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

Xerox PARC Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

and later founded 3Com * Marc Raibert, who created the robot company

Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics, Inc., is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a Research spin-off, spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Boston Dynamics has been owne ...

* Drew Houston, co-founder of

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropbox w ...

* Colin Angle and Helen Greiner who, with previous CSAIL director

, founded iRobot * Jeremy Wertheimer, who developed

ITA Software ITA Software is a travel industry software division of Google, formerly an independent company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded by Jeremy Wertheimer, a computer scientist from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Co ...

used by travel websites like

Kayak ] A kayak is a small, narrow human-powered watercraft typically propelled by means of a long, double-bladed paddle. The word ''kayak'' originates from the Inuktitut word '' qajaq'' (). In British English, the kayak is also considered to be ...

and

Orbitz Orbitz.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine. The website is owned by Orbitz Worldwide, Inc., a subsidiary of Expedia Group. It is headquartered in the Citigroup Center, Chicago, Illinois. Background Origi ...

* Max Krohn, co-founder of OkCupid

Directors

;Directors of Project MAC *

, 1963–1968 * J. C. R. Licklider, 1968–1971 *

Edward Fredkin Edward Fredkin (October 2, 1934 – June 13, 2023) was an American computer scientist, physicist and businessman who was an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions included work on reversible computing and cellular au ...

, 1971–1974 * Michael Dertouzos, 1974–1975 ;Directors of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory *

, 1970–1972 * Patrick Winston, 1972–1997 *

, 1997–2003 ;Directors of the Laboratory for Computer Science * Michael Dertouzos, 1975–2001 * Victor Zue, 2001–2003 ;Directors of CSAIL *

, 2003–2007 * Victor Zue, 2007–2011 *

Anant Agarwal Anant Agarwal is an Indian computer architecture researcher. He is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coher ...

, 2011–2012 * Daniela L. Rus, 2012–

CSAIL Alliances

CSAIL Alliances is the industry connection arm of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). CSAIL Alliances offers companies programs to connect with the research, faculty, students, and startups of CSAIL by providing organizations with opportunities to learn about the research, engage with students, explore collaborations with researchers, and join research initiatives such as FinTech at CSAIL, MIT Future of Data, and Machine Learning Applications.

References

External links

* of CSAIL, successor of the AI Lab {{authority control Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Artificial intelligence laboratories Computer science institutes in the United States Laboratories in the United States Information technology research institutes Research institutes in Massachusetts Robotics organizations Scientific organizations established in 2003 2003 establishments in Massachusetts 2003 in computing History of artificial intelligence Computer science institutes Computer science departments in the United States

Research activities

History

Project MAC

AI Lab and LCS

CSAIL

Offices

Outreach activities

Notable researchers

Notable alumni

Directors

CSAIL Alliances

See also

References

Further reading

External links