Project MAC
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| Established | July 1, 1963 (as Project MAC) July 1, 2003 (as CSAIL) |
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Field of research
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Computer science |
| Director | Daniela L. Rus |
| Address | The Stata Center (Building 32) 32 Vassar Street Cambridge, MA 02139 USA |
| Location | Cambridge, MA, USA |
| Nickname | CSAIL |
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Operating agency
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Website | www |
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership.
CSAIL's research activities are organized around a number of semi-autonomous research groups, each of which is headed by one or more professors or research scientists. These groups are divided up into seven general areas of research:
In addition, CSAIL hosts the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Computing research at MIT began with Vannevar Bush's research into a differential analyzer and Claude Shannon's electronic Boolean algebra in the 1930s, the wartime Radiation Laboratory, the post-war Project Whirlwind and Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and Lincoln Laboratory's SAGE in the early 1950s.
Research at MIT in the field of artificial intelligence began in 1959.
On July 1, 1963, Project MAC (the Project on Mathematics and Computation, later backronymed to Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer) was launched with a $2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Project MAC's original director was Robert Fano of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Fano decided to call MAC a "project" rather than a "laboratory" for reasons of internal MIT politics—if MAC had been called a laboratory, then it would have been more difficult to raid other MIT departments for research staff. The program manager responsible for the DARPA grant was J.C.R. Licklider, who had previously been at MIT conducting research in RLE, and would later succeed Fano as director of Project MAC.
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