Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
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:
Artificial intelligence Computational biology Graphics and vision Language and learning Theory of computation Robotics Systems (includes computer architecture, databases, distributed systems, networks and networked systems, operating systems, programming methodology, and software engineering, among others)
History Computing Research at MIT began with Vannevar Bush's research into a differential analyzer and Claude Shannon's electronic Boolean algebra in the 1930s, the wartime MIT Radiation Laboratory, the post-war Project Whirlwind and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and MIT Lincoln Laboratory's SAGE in the early 1950s. At MIT, research in the field of artificial intelligence began in the late 1950s.
Project MAC On July 1, 1963, Project MAC was launched with a $2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). According to the MIT archives:
They chose the project name MAC in 1963 because it is an acronym for several significant phrases describing the project and its goals. "Machine-Aided Cognition" was the broad objective. A "Multiple-Access Computer" was the principal tool. "Men and Computers" were the essential partners in the expected symbiosis, a term used by J. C. R. Licklider in his 1960 paper entitled "Man-Computer Symbiosis." Project MAC's first director was Robert Fano of RLE. Fano called MAC a "project" rather than a "laboratory" for reasons of internal MIT politics – if MAC had been called a laboratory, it would have been more difficult to raid other MIT departments for research staff. The DARPA program manager was J. C. R. Licklider, who had previously been at RLE, and who later succeeded Fano as director of Project MAC. Project MAC became famous for groundbreaking research in operating systems, artificial intelligence, and the theory of computation. Its contemporaries included Project Genie at Berkeley, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and (somewhat later) University of Southern California's (USC's) Information Sciences Institute. An "AI Group" including Marvin Minsky (the director), John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp), and a community of computer programmers were incorporated into Project MAC. They were interested principally in the problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language, which they view as the keys to more intelligent machines. In the 1960s and 1970s the AI Group developed a time-sharing operating system called Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) which ran on PDP-6 and later PDP-10 computers. The early Project MAC community included Fano, Minsky, Licklider, Fernando J. Corbató, and a community of computer programmers and enthusiasts among others who were inspired by John McCarthy. They 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, Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), with him from the MIT Computation Center, using the DARPA funding to purchase an IBM 7094 for research use. CTSS was described in an article on time sharing in Scientific American's 1966 special issue on "Information". It had approximately 100 TTY terminals, mostly on campus but with a few in private homes. About 30 users could be logged in at the same time. The project enlisted students in various classes to use the terminals simultaneously in problem solving, simulations, and multi-terminal communications as tests for the multi-access computing software being developed. One of the early focuses of Project MAC was the development of a successor to CTSS, Multics, which became the first high availability computer system, and a testing ground for the concept of a security kernel. It was initially developed as a part of an industry consortium including General Electric, Bell Laboratories. Following Bell's departure from the project in 1969 and GE's exit from the computer industry in 1970, Project MAC continued to develop Multics throughout the 1970s with Honeywell.
AI Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science In the late 1960s, Minsky's artificial intelligence group sought more space, and was unable to get satisfaction from project director Licklider. Minsky found that although Project MAC as a single entity could not get the additional space he wanted, he could split off to form his own laboratory and then be entitled to more office space. As a result, the MIT AI Lab was formed in 1970, and many of Minsky's AI colleagues left Project MAC to join him in the new laboratory. Programmers such as Richard Stallman, who used TECO to develop EMACS, flourished in the AI Lab during this time. The AI Lab invented Lisp machines, which were commercialized by Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc. in the 1980s. Project MAC itself was officially re-named the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in 1976. Participants continued their research into operating systems, programming languages, distributed systems, security kernels, and the theory of computation. Two professors, Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, formed a smaller group positioned between the two. Officially called the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation (creating a backronym for the discontinued designation "Project MAC"), it was given the playful nickname of "Switzerland" for its ostensible neutrality.
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