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.
Famous quotes containing the words mit, laboratory, information, decision and/or systems:
“This summertime must be forgot
MIt will be, if we would or not....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The best work of artists in any age is the work of innocence liberated by technical knowledge. The laboratory experiments that led to the theory of pure color equipped the impressionists to paint nature as if it had only just been created.”
—Nancy Hale (b. 1908)
“The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.”
—Albert Borgman, U.S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)
“You can hesitate before deciding, but not once the decision is made.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“The only people who treasure systems are those whom the whole truth evades, who want to catch it by the tail. A system is just like truth’s tail, but the truth is like a lizard. It will leave the tail in your hand and escape; it knows that it will soon grow another tail.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)