Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is an interdepartmental laboratory committed to advancing research and education in four main areas:
- Control and system theory
- Optimization and game theory
- Communication and networks
- Statistical signal processing
Taken together, these disciplines span the analytical information and decision sciences, a domain that plays a critical and pervasive role in engineering, science, and society more broadly. The laboratory recognizes the interdependence of our research areas and the fundamental role that mathematics, physics, computers, and computation play in our research.
Extending out from this common core, LIDS staff and students work together with colleagues in several of MIT’s departments in the School of Engineering and the School of Science; in the Sloan School of Management and the Department of Economics; and in other laboratories, centers, and activities including the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Research Laboratory for Electronics, the Operations Research Center, the MIT Energy Initiative, and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology. LIDS is housed in MIT’s Stata Center, a dynamic space that promotes a high level of interaction within the lab and with the larger MIT community.
In addition, faculty and staff in LIDS collaborate with colleagues from around the world, as well as with leading industrial organizations and national laboratories including Draper Laboratory, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Shell Oil Corporation, Siemens Corporation, Ford Motor Company, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Honeywell, and Boeing Corporation. Our current research is sponsored by many of these organizations as well as by U.S. government agencies including the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A sampling of research topics within the Laboratory includes:
- Learning and coordinated control of unmanned autonomous systems
- Scheduling, routing, and resource allocation in communication and vehicular traffic networks
- Large-scale data assimilation for the geosciences
- Biomedical signal and image analysis
- Ultra-wideband communications
- Distributed information fusion in sensor networks
- Optimal control of hybrid vehicles to minimize fuel consumption
- Modeling and distributed control of Smart Power Grids
- Learning, control, and decision-making in distributed systems and both physical and social networks
- Tracking of multiple objects in complex multi-sensor environments
- Cooperative localization in distributed wideband networks
