MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Daniela Rus, CSAIL Director & MIT professor, recently spoke to McKinsey & Company about the current capabilities & real-world potential of robots: https://lnkd.in/gUW8pUBH "What’s important to realize is that a robot is a machine with two important aspects: the body and the brain," she told them. "The body is important because it determines the extent of a robot’s capabilities. If you have a robot on wheels, it won’t go up the stairs. The body has to be closely mapped to the desired task. The brain is important because it is a collection of software algorithms that get the body to do what it’s meant to do. You need this tight connection and coupling between body and brain. Advances happen only when we have simultaneous advances on the body side and on the brain side."

From the United States Naval Academy to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Strahinja Janjusevic is a CSAIL graduate student with a bright future. He's building research connections and growing his career as a part of the area's growing national security community. https://bit.ly/4uHKSsz

MIT PhD student & CSAIL researcher Alexander Htet Kyaw SM ’26, along w/colleagues at MIT Department of Architecture, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), & MIT EECS, have been selected for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas for their “Speech to Reality” system: https://lnkd.in/dVFu82rr It’s an AI-powered robotic assembly system that turns spoken descriptions into physical objects. Give it a prompt like “I need a chair,” & it can generate a design w/3D AI & assemble a real object from modular parts in minutes, making fabrication faster, more accessible, & more sustainable: https://lnkd.in/gMU2iyhR

Alex Zhang, MIT PhD student & CSAIL researcher, has been named one of Scientific American's Young American Scientists. He’s received the honor, which is being given out for the first time, for his research highlighting where language models are underutilized & how to design better agent harnesses: https://lnkd.in/gGxN_Tv2 His work highlights how AI models are "mismanaged geniuses" that could take on a much wider range & depth of tasks when composed well. In line w/this research direction, he developed Recursive Language Models, a paradigm in which the prompt context is offloaded as an object in code, & language models recursively call themselves or other LMs as functions in code to build up to a final answer.

Hello and happy Monday! Read on for this week's fresh news and resources from MIT CSAIL. As always, leave a comment on what interests you ↓

🌟 MIT Jameel Clinic AI faculty lead Regina Barzilay was just named to the 2026 #100WomenInAI list by X-Factor Ventures and Flybridge alongside an incredible group of women who are leading the next era of innovation. The list highlights women whose technical accomplishments, leadership, and societal impact are disrupting the status quo and shaping the future of AI. Split into six categories, the list highlights Regina as an honoree under "Researchers" for her work in significantly advancing human language technology and transforming medical diagnostics and drug discovery, such as Mirai, Sybil, and the Boltz model series. 📰 Read more: https://lnkd.in/e8UepSJC #aiforgood #aiforhealth #healthcareinnovation #machinelearningsolutions #womenintech #womeninstem #womeninai #NYTechWeek

MIT researchers provide a major upgrade to the nearly century-old idea of random utility models. They proved that it is impossible to get information about correlations from two-way comparisons alone. Correlations can be discerned, however, when large numbers of people rate three alternatives in their order of preference: https://lnkd.in/dSPue945

Rachit Nigam, MIT EECS assistant professor & CSAIL principal investigator, has received an Honorable Mention for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation award for his work on democratizing how hardware systems are built: https://lnkd.in/eK3pmwUR Nigam previously received the SIGPLAN Dissertation Award, an Honorable Mention for the SIGARCH Dissertation Award, & Cornell’s CIS Dissertation award for his research. Read more about his dissertation: https://lnkd.in/eTZjSXtv

The CSAIL Living Lab is a space, but it's also the robots inside. 🤖 Come meet a few! (and the humans Professor Andreea Bobu and grad student Wil Norton). Link in comments for the full Living Lab tour ↓ https://lnkd.in/eiHNDwMm