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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.

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CSAIL article

CSAIL Alliances Affiliate Member Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) hosted a January 2025 IAP course, “The Nexus of Games and AI.” Designed to “introduce students to game creation, current game-related research, and an exploration of the technology, the art, and the fun of video games,” this course allowed SIE to engage with a broad range of students, meet CSAIL faculty, and deepen their connection to MIT CSAIL.

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MIT Assistant Professor Sara Beery (left) discussed a sonar monitoring system with another researcher (Credits: Justin Kay).
CSAIL article

Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery was drawn to the Institute’s commitment to “computing for the planet,” and set out to bring her methods to global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring.

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The researchers found that VLMs need much more domain-specific training data to process difficult queries. By familiarizing with more informative data, the models could one day be great research assistants to ecologists, biologists, and other nature scientists (Credit: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL).
CSAIL article

Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.

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 EECS faculty and CSAIL principal investigators Sara Beery, Marzyeh Ghassemi, and Yoon Kim (Credit: MIT EECS).
CSAIL article

Sara Beery, Marzyeh Ghassemi, and Yoon Kim, EECS faculty and CSAIL principal investigators, were awarded AI2050 Early Career Fellowships earlier this week for their pursuit of “bold and ambitious work on hard problems in AI.” They received this honor from Schmidt Futures, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative that aims to accelerate scientific innovation.