Q+A With The First Female Director Of MIT's Largest Research Lab
Source: Peter High
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. More than 250 companies have been hatched through CSAIL, including Akamai, iRobot, 3Com, and Meraki. CSAIL’s research activities are divided into seven areas of emphasis:
Artificial intelligence
Computational biology
Graphics and vision
Language and learning
Theory of computation
Robotics
Systems
CSAIL’s Director is Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a 2002 MacArthur Fellow. She is the first female head of CSAIL, a distinction she has used to help inspire other women to follow in her footsteps into the fields emphasized by the laboratory. From her post, she has been able to witness and influence a number of rising trends in technology that are driving the current digital revolution, all of which we cover in this interview.
(This is the eleventh interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Geoff Hinton of Google, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, or Jeff Dean of Google. To read future stories in the AI series, please click the “Follow” link above, and follow me on Twitter.)
Peter High: Can you give some background on your lab?
Daniela Rus: For more than 50 years, CSAIL’s research has pushed the boundaries of computing and played a vital role in the digital revolution, from the first time-sharing systems and the first computer password to public key encryption and the free-software movement.
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