Past 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.

Please join CSAIL Alliances and Google for  “PhD Research & Engineering Insights” event at CSAIL on November 6. The session will also include application and interview tips. Food will be served! Registration is required to attend.

We’re excited to welcome back two recent MIT graduates, CSAIL grad Suvinay Subramanian and RLE grad Anny Zheng, now working at Google. They will speak with us about their experiences transitioning from the lab to the workplace. Learn more by clicking "Speakers."

Join these MIT PhD alumni for an insider's look at life as a Googler.

Learn about:

• Day-to-day experiences Hear firsthand accounts of what it's like to work on research and engineering projects at Google.
• Cutting-edge research Discover how Google fosters innovation and pushes the boundaries of technology.
• Application and interview process Get valuable tips and insights into successfully navigating the Google hiring process.

This session will feature a presentation followed by a Q&A.

TO BE RESCHEDULED

Navigating NSF Programs & Non-Dilutive Pathways in a Government Shutdown

Your research may be the foundation of a disruptive new startup — but translating your research and ideas into a successful startup venture requires an understanding of customers, competitors, channels, business basics, and fundraising fundamentals.

Join MIT CSAIL Alliances and the NSF New England I-Corps Hub for a research and deep-tech startup strategy session designed for first-time and aspiring technical founders. If your research is at the frontiers of AI, Compute, Quantum, Robotics, Health, Bioinnovation, Manufacturing, Energy, Materials, or other “key technology focus areas” this session is for you. 

​What to Expect:

• Navigating Uncertainty: the federal government may be closed, but you can still act to be ready when agencies reopen soon.
• How to build a roadmap: sequence your funding, discover your customers, create milestones, derisk your development, leverage non-dilutive funding.  
• Actions you can take now: NSF programs and pathways from local $1k SPARK microgrants for customer discovery and market analysis leading to $2M SBIR or TTP programs to support the commercialization of your research and idea.
• The benefits of government funding: Learn from founders that used non-dilutive federal funds to build out their technology, extend their runway, and scale up without selling ownership early.
• Grant writing: Learn about the upcoming IAP workshop “How to Write Winning SBIR Grants”
• Meet 1:1 at end of session with NSF I-Corp team members and recent NSF grant awardees

Note: NSF New England I-Corp Spark/Fusion programs and micro-grant offerings are open and operating through the government shutdown. NSF, NIH, and other agencies are still holding to current published proposal submission deadlines (e.g. SBIR/STTR and TTP).
 

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 the CSAIL Forum with Alison Gopnik

Speaker: Alison Gopnik Dept. of Psychology, UC Berkeley
Venue: Live stream via Zoom: Registration required
Abstract: Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition, and causal knowledge is central to both intuitive and scientific world models. However, causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for standard Large Models using standard techniques of deep learning. In contrast, cognitive scientists have applied advances in our formal understanding of causation in computer science, particularly within the Causal Bayes Net formalism, to understand human causal learning. These approaches also face challenges when it comes to learning however. In parallel, in the very different tradition of reinforcement learning, researchers have developed the idea of an intrinsic reward signal called “empowerment”. An agent is rewarded for maximizing the mutual information between its actions and their outcomes, regardless of the external reward value of those outcomes. In other words, the agent is rewarded if variation in an action systematically leads to parallel variation in an outcome so that variation in the action predicts variation in the outcome. Empowerment, then has two dimensions , it involves both controllability and variability. The result is an agent that has maximal control over the maximal part of its environment. “Empowerment” may be an important bridge between classical Bayesian causal learning and reinforcement learning and may help to characterize causal learning in humans and enable it in machines.  If an agent learns an accurate causal model of the world they will necessarily increase their empowerment, and, vice versa, increasing empowerment will lead to a more accurate (if implicit) causal model of the world. Empowerment may also explain distinctive empirical features of children’s causal learning, as well as providing a more tractable computational account of how that learning is possible.

Learn more about the CSAIL Forum