Events

Please join us for The Ups and Downs of Entrepreneurship, presented by Dell and CSAIL Alliances.

Entrepreneurship looks exciting from the outside. The reality is harder and richer. In this fireside chat, Sami Shalabi, CTO and founder of Maven AGI, shares what he learned by selling a startup to Google, then spending a decade building products like Google News, and now starting again as co-founder and CTO at Maven AGI, an AI native company reinventing customer experience. 

In this fireside chat, we will explore the early spark, the long grind, learning distribution, and how to shift your mindset about technology. Spoiler alert–it's not about the tech, it's about solving customer problems. 

Leave with practical habits, stories from the trenches, and a clear sense of how to keep going when the path is not straight.

Please register to join us on November 12!

Learn more about our speakers by visiting the speaker section. 

Learn more about CSAIL Alliances and startups.

Join us for CSAIL's first Pitch to Match session, presented in coordination with CSAIL Alliances members Dell, LDVP, and Underscore VC.

New ventures, this is a prime opportunity to pitch your "ask" to a targeted audience of CSAIL Alliances corporate members, Startup Ecosystem partners, fellow leading entrepreneurs, and near-peer founders.
 

What's the Pitch?

This is your chance to clearly articulate what you need to take your venture to the next level. We're looking for focused, high-impact requests that our room can help fulfill.

Your maximum pitch time is 3 minutes. We'll review all applications to select the most impactful “asks” we can effectively address during the session. You must apply to pitch!

What Can Your Venture Get Help With?

By pitching, your venture can gain critical support in areas such as:

• Funding and Resources
• Design Partners for Technology Development
• Market Validation and Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs)
• Finding Connections to Complimentary Technologies
• De-Risking Tools for Startup Strategy
• Mentorship and Advisor Introductions
• Making Founder Connections
• And More!

Who Should Apply:

We highly encourage graduate students who are nearing graduation and are in the idea to early-stage development of their venture to apply. However, applications are open to CSAIL ventures at any stage that have a clear, actionable "ask."

The Event:

The session will be structured for maximum engagement and connection:

• 20 Minutes of Pitches
• 10 Minute Networking Break
• 20 Minutes of Remaining Pitches
• Networking for the rest of the event!

Ready to apply? Fill out this form.

Contact Christiana Kalfas for more info at ckalfas@mit.edu.

This event is organized by MIT Industrial Liaison Program (MIT ILP) with special discounts for friends of MIT CSAIL and complimentary passes for CSAIL Alliances members.

Visit the official event page for full event details.

Save 70% with code ILP70CSAIL at checkout. 
CSAIL Alliances Members, contact your CRC for a fully complimentary pass.

While 2025 presented challenges and uncertainty, it also opened the door to new opportunities. Navigating this landscape with insight allows us to turn obstacles into growth.

This is the MIT ILP flagship event of the year, featuring keynote talks, technical tracks, startup presentations, and moderated discussions with industry leaders—designed to encourage learning and connection.

Day 1 will open with researchers and practitioners examining global drivers of change, focusing on AI, the future of work, advanced manufacturing, robotics, national security, and the dynamics of scarcity and geopolitics. The day will also include lightning talks from 10 startups from MIT Startup Exchange.

On Day 2, attendees can choose from six concurrent tracks covering developments in entrepreneurship, sustainable energy, space technology, cybersecurity and data analytics, advanced materials, and life sciences.

The CSAIL Forum event series is hosted by Professor Daniela Rus, CSAIL Director. This virtual series was created to inspire conversation, share insights, and shape the future of computer science and artificial intelligence. Registration is required. 
See past forum recordings and learn more here

Please join us for CSAIL Forum with Prof. Sam Madden

Speaker: Sam Madden, College of Computing Distinguished Professor
Date/time: Tuesday 12:00-1:00 EDT, November 18, 2025 
Venue: Live stream via Zoom: Registration required
Title: How I Learned to Start Querying and Love AI

Abstract: 
Over the past five decades, the relational database model has proven to be a scaleable and adaptable model for querying a variety of structured data, with use cases in analytics, transactions, graphs, streaming and more. However, most of the world’s data is unstructured. Thus, despite their success, the reality is that the vast majority of the world’s data has remained beyond the reach of relational systems. The rise of deep learning and generative AI offers an opportunity to change this. These models provide a stunning capability to extract semantic understanding from almost any type of document, including text, images, and video which can extend the reach of databases to all the world's data. In this talk I explore how these new technologies will transform the way we build database management software, creating new systems that can ingest, store, process, and query all data. Building such systems presents many opportunities and challenges. In this talk I focus on three: scalability, correctness, and reliability, and argue that the declarative programming paradigm that has served relational systems so well offers a path forward in the new world of AI data systems as well. To illustrate this, I describe several examples of such declarative AI systems we have built in document and video processing, and provide a set of research challenges and opportunities to guide research in this exciting area going forward.

Bio:  
Samuel Madden is the College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing at MIT. His research interests include databases, distributed computing, and AI systems. Past research projects include learned database systems, the C-Store column-oriented database system, and the CarTel mobile sensor network system. Madden heads the Data Systems Group at MIT and the Data Science and AI Lab (DSAIL), an industry supported collaboration focused on developing systems that use AI and machine learning. Registration required

Madden received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003 where he worked on the TinyDB system for data collection from sensor networks. Madden was named one of Technology Review's Top 35 Under 35 in 2005 and an ACM Fellow in 2020, and is the recipient of several awards including the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award and "test of time" awards from VLDB, SIGMOD, SIGMOBILE, and SenSys. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientist at Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which develops technology to make roads safer and drivers better.