Almost all of the research by MIT EECS faculty, staff, and students is carried out in interdepartmental laboratories, centers, and programs. The primary labs include the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), the Microsystems and Technology Laboratories (MTL) and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). For a complete list of laboratories, centers and programs at MIT, visit http://web.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/research/.
As a convenience for administering the department doctoral program, research activities in EECS are divided into three Graduate Research Areas. Some research areas (for example, Robotics) are interdisciplinary by nature, and span several of these headers.
Electrical Engineering comprises the following research communities:
- Biological and Medical Devices and Systems
- Electronic, Magnetic, Optical and Quantum Materials and Devices
- Energy
- Integrated Circuits and Systems
- Nanoscale Materials, Devices and Systems
- Robotics
Computer Science comprises the following research communities:
- Algorithms and Theory
- Computational Biology
- Computer Architecture
- Graphics and Vision
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Programing Languages and Software Engineering
- Robotics
- Security and Cryptography
- Systems and Networking
​Bioinformatics research is also included in Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence + Decision Making comprises the following research communities:
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- Computational Biology
- Graphics and Vision
- ML and Social Science
- Natural Language and Speech Processing
- Optimization and Game Theory
- Robotics
- Systems, Theory, Control and Autonomy