Uncovering the invisible pressures shaping language
Sihan Chen, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, studies the social and environmental factors that shape the development of languages.
Estimating the informativeness of data
MIT researchers can now estimate how much information data are likely to contain, in a more accurate and scalable way than previous methods.
Xzavier Herbert, a bright star in space math
Math student pursues research at NASA studying connections between classical information theory and quantum information theory.
Raising cryptography’s standards
Calculating encryption schemes’ theoretical security guarantees eases comparison, improvement.
New frontier in error-correcting codes
Coding scheme for interactive communication is the first to near optimality on three classical measures.
Collecting just the right data
When you can’t collect all the data you need, a new algorithm tells you which to target.
3-D images, with only one photon per pixel
New scheme could enable laser rangefinders to infer depth from a hundredth as much light — and to produce images from only one nine-hundredth the light.
Encryption is less secure than we thought
For 65 years, most information-theoretic analyses of cryptographic systems have made a mathematical assumption that turns out to be wrong.
Beefing up public-key encryption
MIT researchers show how to secure widely used encryption schemes against attackers who have intercepted examples of successful decryption.
Explaining the origins of word order using information theory
Researchers believe that information theory — the discipline that gave us digital communication — can explain differences between human languages.
What number is halfway between 1 and 9? Is it 5 — or 3?
A new information-theoretical model of human sensory perception and memory sheds light on some peculiarities of the nervous system.
The elusive capacity of networks
Calculating the total capacity of a data network is a notoriously difficult problem, but information theorists are beginning to make some headway.
The blind codemaker
New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission, even over fluctuating wireless links.
Perfect communication with imperfect chips
Error-correcting codes discovered at MIT can still guarantee reliable communication, even in cellphones with failure-prone low-power chips.
Secure, synchronized, social TV
A technique called network coding could protect users’ privacy and providers’ content while making communications networks more efficient.