The MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems is an interdisciplinary research laboratory of MIT, working on research in the areas of communications, control, and signal processing combining faculty from the School of Engineering, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Department of Mathematics and the MIT Sloan School of Management. The lab is located in the Dreyfoos Tower of the Stata Center and shares some research duties with MITs Lincoln Lab and the independent Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. The current acting director is Prof. Alan S. Willsky.
The Laboratory traces its beginnings to the MIT Servomechanics Laboratory, where much work on guidance systems and early computation was done during World War II.
Affectionately called LIDS, the laboratory has hosted several luminaries over the years, such as Claude Shannon and David Forney.
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“This summertime must be forgot
MIt will be, if we would or not....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he’d have a talk show.”
—Timothy Leary (b. 1920)
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—Fred Rogers (20th century)
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—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)