MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL, is an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formed on July 1, 2003 by the merger of MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. CSAIL is the largest such laboratory at MIT, both in terms of the scope of its research and in terms of the number of members. The director of CSAIL is Prof. Rodney Brooks. CSAIL is housed at the Stata Center, designed by Frank Gehry.
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
- Computational biology
- Graphics and Vision
- Language and Learning
- Theory of computation
- Robotics
- Systems (includes computer architecture, databases, distributed systems, operating systems, programming methodology, and software engineering among others)
In addition, CSAIL hosts the World Wide Web Consortium.
Famous CSAIL members, affiliates, and alumni
(Including members and alumni of CSAIL's predecessor labs.)
- MacArthur Fellows Tim Berners-Lee, Erik Demaine, Daniela Rus, Peter Shor and Richard Stallman
- Turing Award recipients Leonard M. Adleman, Fernando J. Corbato, Butler W. Lampson, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Ronald L. Rivest, and Adi Shamir
- Rolf Nevanlinna Prize recipients Madhu Sudan, Peter Shor
- Gödel Prize Recipients Shafi Goldwasser (two-time recipient), Silvio Micali, Charles Rackoff, Johan Håstad, Peter Shor, and Madhu Sudan
- Grace Murray Hopper Award recipients Robert Metcalfe, Shafi Goldwasser, Guy L. Steele, and W. Daniel Hillis
- Textbook authors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein
- Carl Hewitt designer of the Planner programming language, founder of the Actor model of concurrent systems, and co-developer of the Scientific Community Metaphor.
- David D. Clark, former chief protocol architect for the Internet, and 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" (see End-to-end principle)
- Seymour Papert, inventor of the Logo programming language
- Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the ELIZA computer-simulated therapist
- Bob Frankston, developer (with Harvard MBA Dan Bricklin) of VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet
- There are several prestigious spinoff companies out of the lab. For a recent list see this link