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From fish to machines: The natural ‘control law’ of fish was embedded in swarms of robotic cars, drones, and boats (Credit: Christian Ziegler/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior).
CSAIL article

Fish are masters of coordinated motion. Schools of fish have no leader, yet individuals manage to stay in formation, avoid collisions, and respond with liquid flexibility to changes in their environment. Reproducing this combination of robustness and flexibility has been a long-standing challenge for human engineered systems like robots. Now, using virtual reality for freely-moving fish, a research team based in Konstanz has taken an important step towards that goal.

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Ray and Maria Stata Center
CSAIL article

An estimated 20% of every dollar spent on manufacturing is wasted, totaling up to $8 trillion a year, more than the entire annual budget for the U.S. federal government. While industries like healthcare and finance have been rapidly transformed by digital technologies, manufacturing has relied on traditional processes that lead to costly errors, product delays, and an inefficient use of engineers’ time.

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“I have such a soft spot for OpenCourseWare — it shaped my career,” says Ana Trišović, a research scientist at MIT CSAIL’s FutureTech lab (Credits: Courtesy of Ana Trišović).
CSAIL article

As a college student in Serbia with a passion for math and physics, Ana Trišović found herself drawn to computer science and its practical, problem-solving approaches. It was then that she discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, and decided to study a course on Data Analytics with Python in 2012 — something her school didn’t offer.