About CSAIL

The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL, was formed on July 1st, 2003 by the merger of the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science, each with four decades of rich history. In so doing, the merger created the largest interdepartmental laboratory on campus, with nearly eight hundred members and ninety-plus principal investigators. CSAIL members come from seven academic departments -- Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mathematics, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Brain and Cognitive Science, Mechanical Engineering, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. CSAIL is also the home of the World Wide Web Consortium.

The primary mission of CSAIL is research in both computer science and artificial intelligence, broadly construed. It is organized into three directorates:

• Artificial Intelligence: This area of research aims to understand and develop systems - living and artificial - capable of intelligent reasoning, perception and behavior. Specific research areas include: classical AI, computational biology, computer graphics, computer vision, human language technology, machine learning, medical informatics, robotics, and the semantic web.
• Systems: This area of research aims to discover common principles, models, metrics, and tools of computer systems, both hardware and software. Specific research areas include compilers, computer architecture and chip design, operating systems, programming languages, and computer networks.
• Theory: This area of research studies the mathematics of computation and its consequences. Specific research areas include algorithms, complexity theory, computational geometry, cryptography, distributed computing, information security, and quantum computing.

Much of the research at CSAIL is done as projects by faculty members working with undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, plus research staff. Sometimes a large number of PIs collaborate on lab-wide projects that cut across directorates, such as the Oxygen Project or the T-Party Project.

Research at CSAIL is sponsored by a large number of US government agencies (including NSF, DARPA, NIH, AFOSR, NASA, ONR), a wide spectrum of US and international companies (including Quanta Computers, Nokia, Shell, Microsoft, Toyota, NTT, Boeing, DuPont, SAP, Cisco, and Pfizer), and other organizations (including the Singapore-MIT Alliance, ITRI, DSTA, CSIRO, the Delta Environmental and Educational Foundation, and the Epoch Foundation).