Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a

research institute A research institute, research centre, research center 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 i ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(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 The Ray and Maria Stata Center or Building 32 is a 430,000-square-foot (40,000 m2) academic complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The building opened for initial ...

, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the

Schwarzman College of Computing The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is a college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Announced in 2018 to address the growing applications of computing technolog ...

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 intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

Computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

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 data, as in design and manufacture ...

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 un ...

Language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

and

learning Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, value (personal and cultural), values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machine learning, machines ...

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., a ...

Robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...

* Systems (includes

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, t ...

, databases,

distributed systems A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

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, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s, programming methodology, and

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, among others) In addition, CSAIL hosts the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

(W3C).

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 headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...

'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 operati ...

and

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory". As a 21-year-o ...

'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 variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas in e ...

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 31 ...

, 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 t ...

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 ...

SAGE Sage or SAGE may refer to: Plants * ''Salvia officinalis'', common sage, a small evergreen subshrub used as a culinary herb ** Lamiaceae, a family of flowering plants commonly known as the mint or deadnettle or sage family ** ''Salvia'', a large ...

in the early 1950s. At MIT, research in the field of artificial intelligence began in 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 Adv ...

(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 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...

, 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 intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech 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., a ...

. Its contemporaries included

Project Genie Project Genie was a computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early time-sharing system including the Berkeley Timesharing System, which was then commercialized as the SDS 940. History Pr ...

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

, the

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center ...

, 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 C ...

's (USC's)

Information Sciences Institute The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications techno ...

. An "AI Group" including

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

(the director), John McCarthy (inventor of

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

), 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 sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence a ...

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 System ...

(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 Fernando José "Corby" Corbató (July 1, 1926 – July 12, 2019) was a prominent American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems. Career Corbató was born on July 1, 1926 in Oakland, Califo ...

, and a community of computer programmers and

enthusiasts In modern usage, enthusiasm refers to intense enjoyment, interest, or approval expressed by a person. The term is related to playfulness, inventiveness, optimism and high energy. The word was originally used to refer to a person possessed by Go ...

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 proces ...

(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 ser ...

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 which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period. Modernization has resulted in an increased reliance on these systems. Fo ...

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

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

and

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

. In 1966, ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...

'' 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. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

distributed system A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

s, and the

. Two professors,

Hal Abelson Harold Abelson (born April 26, 1947) is the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a fellow of the Institute ...

and

Gerald Jay Sussman Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. ...

, 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 machine Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, the ...

s and their attempted

commercialization Commercialization or commercialisation 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 ear ...

by two companies in the 1980s:

Symbolics Symbolics was a computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

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 computing devices by collaborati ...

. "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 iFlytek (), styled as iFLYTEK, is a partially state-owned Chinese information technology company established in 1999. It creates voice recognition software and 10+ voice-based internet/mobile products covering education, communication, music, int ...

, a company sanctioned the following year for allegedly using its technology for surveillance and human rights abuses in

Xinjiang Xinjiang, SASM/GNC: ''Xinjang''; zh, c=, p=Xīnjiāng; formerly romanized as Sinkiang (, ), officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China (PRC), located in the northwest ...

. In October 2019, MIT announced that it would review its partnerships with sanctioned firms such as iFlyTek and

SenseTime SenseTime () is a Hong Kong-headquartered artificial intelligence company with offices in China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Macau, Malaysia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. The compa ...

. In April 2020, the agreement with iFlyTek was terminated. CSAIL moved from the School of Engineering to the newly formed

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 The global digital divide describes global disparities, primarily between developed and developing countries, in regards to access to computing and information resources such as the Internet and the opportunities derived from such access. As with ...

. 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,

Kenya ) , national_anthem = "Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"() , image_map = , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Nairobi , coordinates = , largest_city = Nairobi , ...

Native American Indian Native Americans, also known as American Indians, First Americans, Indigenous Americans, and #Terminology differences, other terms, are the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous peoples of the mainland United States (Indigenous peopl ...

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 region of the United States that generally includes Arizona, New Mexico, and adjacent portions of California, Colorado, N ...

such as the

Navajo Nation The Navajo Nation ( nv, Naabeehó Bináhásdzo), also known as Navajoland, is a Native American reservation in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah; at roughly , the ...

, the

Middle East The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabian Peninsula, Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Anatolia, Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Pro ...

, and

Fiji Islands Fiji ( , ,; fj, Viti, ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, ''Fijī''), 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 ...

. 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 commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 ind ...

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. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

Erik Demaine Erik D. Demaine (born February 28, 1981) is a 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 artist sculptor Martin ...

Dina Katabi Dina Katabi ( ar, دينا قَتابي) is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the director of the MIT Wireless Center. Academic biography Katabi received a bachelor's degree from the ...

Daniela L. Rus Daniela L. Rus is a roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc ...

Regina Barzilay Regina Barzilay (born 1970) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural ...

Peter Shor Peter Williston Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially fa ...

, 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 compu ...

recipients Leonard M. Adleman,

Shafi Goldwasser en, Shafrira Goldwasser , name = Shafi Goldwasser , image = Shafi Goldwasser.JPG , caption = Shafi Goldwasser in 2010 , birth_place = New York City, New York, U.S. , birth_date = , death_date ...

Butler W. Lampson Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the ...

, 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. Micali's research centers on cryptography and information security. In 2012, he received ...

Ronald L. Rivest Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is a cryptography, cryptographer and an List of Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. He is a member of MIT' ...

Adi Shamir Adi Shamir ( he, עדי שמיר; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer. 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 identificat ...

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 development of the Liskov ...

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

, and

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 royalt ...

recipients

Terry Winograd Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intell ...

Patrick Winston Patrick Henry Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succe ...

, David Marr,

Rodney Brooks Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Profes ...

Rolf Nevanlinna Prize The IMU Abacus Medal, known before 2022 as the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, is awarded once every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), for outstanding contributions in Mathematic ...

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 ...

Constantinos Daskalakis Constantinos Daskalakis (; born 29 April 1981) is a Greek theoretical computer scientist. He is a professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labor ...

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 a computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to areas including theoretical foundations of wait-free synchronization, linearizable data structu ...

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 Aw ...

, 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 Melancton Metcalfe (born April 7, 1946) is an engineer and entrepreneur from the United States who helped pioneer the Internet starting in 1970. He co-invented Ethernet, co-founded 3Com and formulated Metcalfe's law, which describes the e ...

Guy L. Steele, Jr. Guy Lewis Steele Jr. (; born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards. Biography Steele was born in Missouri ...

, and

W. Daniel Hillis William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American Invention, inventor, Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered Parallel computing, parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He ...

* Textbook authors

Harold Abelson Harold Abelson (born April 26, 1947) is the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a fellow of the Institute ...

and Gerald Jay Sussman,

Thomas H. Cormen Thomas H. Cormen is the co-author of ''Introduction to Algorithms'', along with Charles Leiserson, Ron Rivest, and Cliff Stein. In 2013, he published a new book titled '' Algorithms Unlocked''. He is a professor of computer science at Dartmout ...

Charles E. Leiserson Charles Eric Leiserson is a computer scientist, specializing in the theory of parallel computing and distributed computing, and particularly practical applications thereof. As part of this effort, he developed the Cilk multithreaded language. H ...

, Ronald L. Rivest,

John Guttag John Vogel Guttag (born March 6, 1949) is an American computer scientist, professor, and former head of the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Education and career John Guttag was raised in Larchmont, New York, th ...

Jerome H. Saltzer Jerome Howard "Jerry" Saltzer (born October 9, 1939) is an American computer scientist. Career Jerry Saltzer received an ScD in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1966. His dissertation Traffic Control in a Multiplexed System was advised ...

Frans Kaashoek Marinus Frans (Frans) Kaashoek (born 1965, Leiden) is a Dutch computer scientist, entrepreneur, and Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for cont ...

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 Scie ...

, and

Nancy Lynch Nancy Ann Lynch (born January 19, 1948) is a mathematician, a theorist, and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the EECS department and heads the "Theory of D ...

David D. Clark David Dana "Dave" Clark (born April 7, 1944) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who has been involved with Internet developments since the mid-1970s. He currently works as a Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Scienc ...

, 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 End-to-end or End to End may refer to: * End-to-end auditable voting systems, a voting system * End-to-end delay, the time for a packet to be transmitted across a network from source to destination * End-to-end encryption, a cryptographic paradigm ...

Arguments in Systems Design" *

Eric Grimson William Eric Leifur Grimson (born 1953) is a Canadian-born computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as Chancellor from 2011 to 2014. An expert in computer vision, he headed MIT's Department ...

, 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 Frankston w ...

, co-developer of

VisiCalc VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hob ...

, 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 artificial ...

, inventor of the

Logo programming language Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. ''Logo'' is not an acronym: the name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Greek ...

Joseph Weizenbaum Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence. Life and caree ...

, creator of the

ELIZA ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, E ...

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 PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

and later founded

3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe ex ...

Directors

;Directors of Project MAC *

, 1963–1968 *

, 1968–1971 *

Edward Fredkin Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. ...

, 1971–1974 *

Michael Dertouzos Michael Leonidas Dertouzos ( el, Μιχαήλ Λεωνίδας Δερτούζος; November 5, 1936 – August 27, 2001) was a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

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

, 1970–1972 *

, 1972–1997 *

, 1997–2003 ;Directors of the Laboratory for Computer Science *

, 1975–2001 *

Victor Zue Victor Waito Zue (born 1944) is a Chinese American computer scientist and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1989 to 2001, he headed the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The group ...

, 2001–2003 ;Directors of CSAIL *

, 2003–2007 *

, 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 cohere ...

, 2011–2012 *

, 2012–

References

External links

* of CSAIL, successor of the AI Lab
"A Marriage of Convenience: The Founding of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory"
Chious et al. — includes important information on the

. {{authority control

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence La ...

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

Research activities

History

Project MAC

AI Lab and LCS

CSAIL

Offices

Outreach activities

Notable researchers

Notable alumni

Directors

See also

References

Further reading

External links