1. The MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
New Research Directions
Polina Golland

2. The Mission of the AI Lab
To answer: How does the human mind work?
Where does the mind reside?
What is the nature of memory?
What are the roles of emotions?
What sort of representations does the brain use?
What does our visual system compute?
How did evolution shape us?
How do we learn?
What is consciousness?

3. What Do We Really Do? Try to build intelligent systems
often application driven
can be internally motivated (faculty or students)
can be motivated by sponsors
Always try to do intellectually exciting things
Put things together in larger scale ways than others might dare
“way cool” to do so
get to explore (first) different aspects of intellectual space than others might be stuck in

4. Who are we? Faculty — 24 Research Staff — 27
Post Doctoral Associate — 8
Visiting Scientists — 10
Research Assistants — 103
UROP — 30
Assistants — 13
Research Affiliate — 8 Total: 223

5. Funding 65% federal government 35% companies Jointly with LCS
DARPA, ONR, NASA, …
35% companies
Jointly with LCS
NTT collaboration
Project Oxygen
Nokia
Philips
Hewlett Packard
Acer
Delta Electronics
(NTT)

6. Some Selected Research
Image guided surgery
Intelligent prosthetics
Rational capture
Information access
Collaboration support
Humanoid robots
Cellular robots