Software

Engineers at MIT have come up with an algorithm to tune a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) camera, simplifying a scene to its most essential visual elements and potentially enabling the development of faster drones.

Faster, more nimble drones on the horizon

New algorithm quickly makes sense of incoming visual data.

May 25, 2017

Modo Labs’ platform is being used by 200 universities and colleges, as well as Fortune 500 companies and hospitals worldwide, reaching millions of users.

Apps created for everyone, by anyone

Platform created to power MIT mobile app is being used widely by colleges, businesses, and hospitals.

March 21, 2017

“Everybody said it was going to be too hard, that you’d have to change the whole compiler,” MIT professor Charles E. Leiserson says. “And these guys basically showed that conventional wisdom to be flat-out wrong.”

Optimizing code

Modifying the “middle end” of a popular compiler yields more-efficient parallel programs.

January 30, 2017

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have designed a new system that automatically handles caching of database queries for web applications written in the web-programming language Ur/Web.

Faster websites with fewer bugs

System that automatically handles database caching in server farms increases speed and reliability.

January 20, 2017

MIT spinout Benchling is bringing life science researchers a cloud-based platform that integrates different types of lab software into one place, with aims of making research and development easier, quicker, and more collaborative.

“Google Docs” for life sciences accelerates discovery

Cloud-based platform assists in managing, sharing data facilitates research.

December 7, 2016

A system developed by researchers at MIT and Stony Brook University should make it easier for researchers to solve complex computational problems using dynamic programming optimized for multicore chips — without the expertise that such programming typically requires.

Faster programs, easier programming

New system lets nonexperts optimize programs that run on multiprocessor chips.

November 7, 2016

“Gitless" removes complicated concepts like "staging" and "stashing," without fundamentally changing Git's core functionality.

Making it easier to collaborate on code

CSAIL team's “Gitless” fixes Git’s biggest issues — and suggests their approach could help improve systems like Gmail and Dropbox.

October 25, 2016

“We want to see, in the next five years or so, the amount of time you need to search for parking spot in a city drop from around 35 to 40 minutes, to less than five minutes,” says Smarking co-founder Wen Sang PhD ’14.

Optimizing parking in the busiest places

Data-analytics platform helps parking managers meet driver demand in high-traffic areas.

October 12, 2016

To demonstrate Foundry, MIT researchers designed and fabricated skis with retro-reflective surfaces, a ping-pong paddle, a helmet, and even a bone that may someday be used for surgical planning.

Designing for 3-D printing

“Foundry” tool from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab lets you design a wide range of multi-material 3-D-printed objects.

October 11, 2016

Researchers have designed a new programming language that lets application developers manage memory more efficiently in programs that deal with scattered data points in large data sets. In tests on several common algorithms, programs written in the new language were four times as fast as those written in existing languages.

Faster parallel computing

New programming language delivers fourfold speedups on problems common in the age of big data.

September 13, 2016

Accelerometers around patients' necks capture data about the motions of their vocal folds to determine if their vocal behavior was normal or abnormal.

How machine learning can help with voice disorders

By detecting signs of vocal misuse, system from CSAIL and Mass General could eventually be used to help diagnose voice disorders.

August 29, 2016

Simulations written in Simit, a new programming language, were dozens or even hundreds of times as fast as those written in existing simulation languages. But they required only one-tenth as much code as meticulously hand-optimized simulations that could achieve similar execution speeds.

User-friendly language for programming efficient simulations

New language can speed up computer simulations 200-fold or reduce the code they require by 90 percent.

August 10, 2016

A new database interface looks like a spreadsheet. Users don’t need to know database scripting languages such as SQL to create new database queries.

Democratizing databases

With a new tool, any competent spreadsheet user can construct custom database interfaces.

July 8, 2016

The researchers’ compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip.

Analog computing returns

New analog compiler could help enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms.

June 20, 2016

“Multicore systems are really hard to program,” says Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “You have to explicitly divide the work that you’re doing into tasks, and then you need to enforce some synchronization between tasks accessing shared data. What this architecture does, essentially, is to remove all sorts of expli...

Parallel programming made easy

New chip design makes parallel programs run many times faster and requires one-tenth the code.