Worldwide Impact

The Laboratory's principal goal is to pursue innovations in information technology that will lead to substantial long-term improvements in the ways people live and work. CSAIL researchers pride themselves for developing forefront technology while managing to achieve societal impact. Their research has brought the world countless innovations, such as time-shared computers, RSA public key encryption, bit-map displays, the World Wide Web, data flow machines and many other ground-breaking technologies that have changed business and industry. Over the past four decades, CSAIL members and their alumni have spun off more than four dozen companies, including Ascent Technology, Akamai, BlueSpec, Determina (now part of VMware), iRobot, ita Software, Open Market (now part of Flatwire), RSA Data Security (now part of EMC2), Sandburst (now part of Broadcom), SightPath (now part of Cisco), and SpeechWorks (now part of Nuance).