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MorphoChrome’s programmable color process adds a luminous touch to things like a necklace charm of a butterfly. What started as a static, black accessory became a shiny pendant (Credits: Courtesy of the researchers).
CSAIL article

Gemstones like precious opal are beautiful to look at and deceivingly complex. As you look at such gems from different angles, you’ll see a variety of tints glisten, causing you to question what color the rock actually is. It’s iridescent thanks to something called structural color — microscopic structures that reflect light to produce radiant hues.

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Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs: Building AI at Scale

MIT Sloan TECH Summit 2026 is a student-led conference at MIT, happening with support from CSAIL Alliances.

Alliances members receive 20% off at registration. Log in to your member account or check with your CRC for your discount code.

Learn more, see the full agenda, and register here

 

Member DiscountAlliances members are eligible for a discount for this program. Please log in to view discount instructions.
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MIT researchers propose breaking software systems down into “concepts” (pieces that each do a specific job) and “synchronizations” (rules that outline how the pieces fit together), potentially opening the door to safer, more automated software development (Credits: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL, using assets from Pexels).
CSAIL article

Coding with large language models (LLMs) holds huge promise, but it also exposes some long-standing flaws in software: code that’s messy, hard to change safely, and often opaque about what’s really happening under the hood. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are charting a more “modular” path ahead. 

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MIT researchers developed a new system that enables individuals to more easily create customized social applications that can seamlessly interoperate with one another (Credits: MIT News; iStock).
CSAIL article

Say a local concert venue wants to engage its community by giving social media followers an easy way to share and comment on new music from emerging artists. Rather than working within the constraints of existing social platforms, the venue might want to create its own social app with the functionality that would be best for its community. But building a new social app from scratch involves many complicated programming steps, and even if the venue can create a customized app, the organization’s followers may be unwilling to join the new platform because it could mean leaving their connections and data behind.

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CSAIL researchers highlighted their research at the intersection of holographic art and human-computer interaction.     Including among these projects were objects w/angle-dependent hues generated by nanoscale diffraction, as well as multi-perspective imagery on 3D-printed items (Credit: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL and the researchers).
CSAIL article

In 1968, MIT Professor Stephen Benton transformed holography by making three-dimensional images viewable under white light. Over fifty years later, holography’s legacy is inspiring new directions at MIT CSAIL, where the Human-Computer Interaction Engineering (HCIE) group, led by Professor Stefanie Mueller, is pioneering programmable color — a future in which light and material appearance can be dynamically controlled.