MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

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The Stata Center houses CSAIL and has very unusual architecture.
The Stata Center houses CSAIL and has very unusual architecture.

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (also CSAIL) is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership.

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[edit] 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:

In addition, CSAIL hosts the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

[edit] History

CSAIL was formed by the merger of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computer Science in July 2003. Computing research at MIT preceded either organization with Vannevar Bush's research into a differential analyzer and Claude Shannon's electronic Boolean algebra in the 1930s, the wartime Radiation Laboratory, the post-war Project Whirlwind and Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and Lincoln Laboratory's SAGE in the early 1950s. Project MAC's contemporaries included Project Genie at Berkeley, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and (somewhat later) USC's Information Sciences Institute.

Research at MIT in the field of artificial intelligence began in 1959.[citation needed] On July 1, 1963, Project MAC (the Project on Mathematics and Computation, later backronymed to Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer) was launched with a $2 million grant from DARPA and headed by Robert Fano of RLE. Fano made the decision to designate MAC as a "project" rather than a "laboratory" since it placed fewer restrictions on recruiting researchers from other MIT departments.[citation needed]

The early Project MAC community included Fano, Fernando J. Corbató, Marvin Minsky, J.C.R. Licklider, 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 time-sharing system, CTSS, with him from the MIT Computation Center, using the DARPA funding to purchase an IBM 7094 for research use. One of the early focuses of Project MAC would be the development of a successor to CTSS, Multics, which was to be the first high availability computer system, developed as a part of an industry consortium including General Electric and Bell Laboratories.

In 1966, Scientific American featured Project MAC in the September thematic issue devoted computer science, which 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.

An "AI Group" under Minsky was incorporated into the newly-formed Project MAC, although it was principally interested in problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language. The lab shared a computer room with a computer (initially a PDP-6, and later a PDP-10) for which they built a time-sharing operating system called ITS.[citation needed] In the late 1960s, the artificial intelligence group sought more space, but Licklider, the project director, resisted.[citation needed] In 1970, Minsky split his group into a separate entity called the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that would be entitled to its own space separate from Project MAC. Minsky served as the director of the new laboratory until 1972, Patrick Winston for a twenty-five year term until 1997, and Rodney Brooks until the merger in 2003.

Those researchers who did not join the smaller AI Lab formed the Laboratory for Computer Science and continue their research into operating systems, programming languages, distributed systems, and the theory of computation. Two professors, Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, chose to remain neutral – their group was referred to variously as Switzerland and Project MAC for the next 30 years.[citation needed]

On the fortieth anniversary of Project MAC's establishment, July 1, 2003, LCS re-merged with the AI Lab to form the 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.

[edit] Notable researchers

(Including members and alumni of CSAIL's predecessor labs.)

[edit] Further reading

[edit] References

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