New approach to distributing computations could make multicore chips much faster. Computer chips’ clocks have stopped getting faster. To keep delivering performance improvements, chipmakers are instead giving chips more processing units, or cores, which can execute computations in parallel. But the ways in which a chip carves up computations can make a big difference to…

Every undergraduate computer-science major takes a course on data structures, which describes different ways of organizing data in a computer’s memory. Every data structure has its own advantages: Some are good for fast retrieval, some for efficient search, some for quick insertions and deletions, and so on. Today, hardware manufacturers are making computer chips faster…

MIT researchers have discovered a new mathematical relationship — between material thickness, temperature, and electrical resistance — that appears to hold in all superconductors. They describe their findings in the latest issue of Physical Review B. The result could shed light on the nature of superconductivity and could also lead to better-engineered superconducting circuits for…

Researchers at MIT and Northeastern University have equipped a robot with a novel tactile sensor that lets it grasp a USB cable draped freely over a hook and insert it into a USB port. The sensor is an adaptation of a technology called GelSight, which was developed by the lab of Edward Adelson, the John…

In the age of big data, visualization tools are vital. With a single glance at a graphic display, a human being can recognize patterns that a computer might fail to find even after hours of analysis. But what if there are aberrations in the patterns? Or what if there’s just a suggestion of a visual…

Much artificial-intelligence research addresses the problem of making predictions based on large data sets. An obvious example is the recommendation engines at retail sites like Amazon and Netflix. But some types of data are harder to collect than online click histories —information about geological formations thousands of feet underground, for instance. And in other applications…

Algorithm for determining orientation of objects could aid robots in navigation, scene understanding. Suppose you’re trying to navigate an unfamiliar section of a big city, and you’re using a particular cluster of skyscrapers as a reference point. Traffic and one-way streets force you to take some odd turns, and for a while you lose sight…

Study examines use of ‘Exhibit’ tools in creating interactive data visualizations. In 2007, members of the Haystack Group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory released a set of Web development tools called “Exhibit.” Exhibit lets novices quickly put together interactive data visualizations, such as maps with sortable data embedded in them; sortable tables…

MIT research shows that it may be time to let software, rather than hardware, manage the high-speed on-chip memory banks known as ‘caches.’ In today’s computers, moving data to and from main memory consumes so much time and energy that microprocessors have their own small, high-speed memory banks, known as “caches,” which store frequently used…

For 65 years, most information-theoretic analyses of cryptographic systems have made a mathematical assumption that turns out to be wrong. Information theory — the discipline that gave us digital communication and data compression — also put cryptography on a secure mathematical foundation. Since 1948, when the paper that created information theory first appeared, most information-theoretic…

Systems that can convert written specifications into working code in a few narrow cases could be generalized to other tasks. In a pair of recent papers, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have demonstrated that, for a few specific tasks, it’s possible to write computer programs using ordinary language rather than special-purpose…

A new hardware design makes data encryption more secure by disguising cloud servers’ memory-access patterns. Cambridge, MA – Cloud computing – outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet – could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms. But it also raises privacy concerns. A…